


Holding Patterns

by gemini_melia



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Rebelcaptain - Freeform, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Survival, Survivor Guilt, exploring some obscure parts of the EU, shipwrecked
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-10-24 00:11:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10730184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemini_melia/pseuds/gemini_melia
Summary: Jyn, Cassian, and Kaytoo escape Scarif and the Death Star. Unable to return to base for fear of being followed, they take off into the Unknown Regions, where they crash land on a mysterious planet. With nothing but their grief and each other, Jyn and Cassian cope with watching the war from the sidelines and figuring out what to do with the second chance they’ve been given.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first foray into Star Wars fandom, so feel free to point out any canon flubs - I may or may not handwave them away for my own purposes. Thanks to Caitlin for the beta and for always pushing my lazy ass to do better. And thanks to you all for reading!

Jyn didn’t know where she was. What she did know was where she was not, and that was a patch of rocky beach where her vision had been consumed by the sight of the world rising up to swallow her whole. Or at least it was  _ a  _ world - a world in its last clutches of life. And she had been so sure that she would be there with that world, leaving this life in a blaze of destruction with only the vague sense of hope in her chest that had held her panic at bay. That hope had been an anvil on her chest, rooting her to the ground, when her body wanted nothing more than to fly apart at the seams.

Jyn took a breath. There was a weight on her chest now, too, but it was not her clutching hope. It was warm and solid and heavy. With an effort she did not feel capable of, she lifted a hand and found the source of the weight - a body.

Jyn squeezed her eyes shut tight against the thought of whose body she held. The last thing she remembered was Cassian - her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, the roughness of his beard against her skin. She had no way of knowing if the others had survived, if they could have had such luck, but her gut told her that it must be Cassian’s weight against her. Her gut lurched at the thought of it being anyone else.

With another intake of breath, Jyn forced her eyes open and saw that it  _ was _ Cassian. Whereas before, when they’d stumbled to the beach, Cassian had been weak, barely strong enough to hold her hand, now here he was gripping the fabric of her shirt so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. His eyes were wide but unseeing, and his breath came in quick, hard punches of air through his nose. Once she took her eyes off the man, it was like the flip of a comm link switch; she was enveloped in sheer cacophony of noise and light and shuddering movement around her. A red warning light was flashing above them, accompanied by a blaring klaxon. It all flooded Jyn’s senses, making orienting herself impossible. 

Looking past Cassian, Jyn could see that they were on the floor of yet another cargo ship. The frame was quaking so hard beneath them that Jyn was sure they were about to fall out of the sky. It was like Jedha all over again, and for a moment the familiarity, the deja vu, was almost a comfort - it was, at least, a known entity. Though her mind raced, her body had reached its breaking point, and Jyn could do little more than lie there, taking in her surroundings while her muscles spasmed feebly.

She couldn’t say how long they both laid there. At one point she faded back out of consciousness, and when she awoke again the ship had gone blessedly silent. The red light still flashed, and the ship bucked beneath them, but the alarm had stopped, and Jyn began to gather her bearings. It took her a long time to get Cassian to loosen his clenched hands from her shirt. All she could think to do - all she could physically manage - was something her father had done when she was a little girl. It was one of the few vivid memories she had of him.

“You look frightened, Stardust,” he’d said in their flat high up amid the the skyscrapers of Coruscant. From her bedroom, Jyn remembered the constant barrage of flashing lights outside her window. When Galen had held her in the semi-darkness after a nightmare, he’d carded his rough callused fingers through her tangled hair. 

Though each and every muscle she had ached and protested at the slight movement, Jyn lifted one hand and slowly, gently laid it at the nape of Cassian’s neck. When he didn’t protest, or even move, she let her fingers slide through the short hair at the base of his skull. It was matted and greasy, but that didn’t matter - there was not a part of them that had been left unscathed, unmarred with grime and sweat. As she gently threaded her fingers through Cassian’s hair and moved her hand up to faintly trace the curve of his head, she began to worry. His breathing had slowed slightly, but his eyes remained glazed, staring in blank shock at nothing. 

“Cassian,” she said, or rather, tried to say. The name barely left her mouth in anything more than a wheezing rasp.

But it was enough. Cassian’s breath stilled and his eyes blinked - once, twice, and then in rapid succession.

“Cassian,” Jyn repeated, this time with force enough to send her into a coughing fit. She saw stars at the pain that coursed down her razed throat; her mouth tasted of ash and smoke. Cassian bolted upright at the disturbance, hands still clutching at Jyn’s shirt. Jyn struggled to pull herself into a seated position as she gasped for air, and they both surveyed the streams of light as the atmosphere soared past them outside the window of the ship. 

Jyn was reminded again of their escape from Jedha, of Cassian and Kaytoo at the helm, and suddenly panic rose like bile in her throat as she realized she had no earthly idea who was piloting their ship.

As if in answer to her unasked question, Kaytoo appeared from the cockpit a couple yards away, swiveling his head around for a brief moment to take in their place on the floor. “Oh, did you two finally decide to wake up? If you’re feeling quite rested, I could use a second pair of hands in this daring rescue mission.”

The sound of another familiar voice jolted Cassian further back into reality, eyes wide in disbelief. With a brief jerk, he looked down at his hands, still knotted in Jyn’s shirt, and slowly loosened his grip with obvious effort. For the first time since they’d arrived on this mysterious ship, Cassian looked at Jyn and their eyes met. He reached a shaking hand up to cup her cheek. His movements were rough and uncoordinated as he moved from her cheek to her brow, down to her nose and finally a slightly softer swipe of his thumb against her lips. It was as if he needed to ensure himself that she was real.

Jyn reached up and stilled his hand with her own, firm and what she hoped was reassuring. A huff of breath escaped Cassian’s mouth in what Jyn realized was a laugh. His wide eyes shone and his lips moved into a small incredulous smile - one that Jyn thought looked more like a rictus of pain.

“ _ Captain _ ,” came Kaytoo’s voice from the cockpit, this time more pointed and urgent. “Our chance of survival is rapidly decreasing with every minute we remain in this system.” 

Cassian’s face fell, and in an instant he was stumbling to his feet toward the cockpit and the pilot’s chair. “Kay?!” he called, but Jyn’s attention shifted as realization struck her.

_ Pilot _ ...Jyn thought, and tamped down another wave of nausea - half panic, half grief and a whole array of emotions that threatened to drown her. She slowly got her feet under her, legs shaky but they held her weight, and moved to the single small port window in the side of the ship, where below, Jyn could see the blast radius from the Death Star’s single sickly green shot. It was larger than the strike against Jedha City, Jyn thought. The planet looked like it would cave in on itself, a massive crater that got bigger with every moment she watched.

“Hold onto something,” Cassian said behind her, and Jyn turned, tearing her eyes away from the nightmare below, to stumble over to the cockpit. Cassian caught her gaze as she steadied herself on the back of his chair. Though his eyes were weary with countless hours under so much duress, Jyn could see past the show of strength he always possessed in the line of duty to a stormcloud churning behind his eyes, with flashes of emotion she could not get a handle on. Jyn moved her hand to Cassian’s shoulder as he pushed them into hyperspace, and held her footing as they leapt light years through the galaxy.

* * *

Once they were settled on their route, they had a few hours to rest and regroup. It was enough time for Kaytoo to administer rudimentary first aid with the limited supplies they discovered on board, enough time for them to begin formulating a plan. 

“We don’t know how many Imperial ships were left above Scarif when we left. We could have been followed,” Cassian said, sitting stock still in the pilot’s seat as Kaytoo dabbed at his scorched side with antiseptic before applying a bacta patch.

“Why waste their resources on us when the plans are with the Alliance?” Jyn countered, sitting across from him in Kaytoo’s vacated seat with her legs crossed, rifling through their first aid supplies, taking a mental inventory. It was more for distraction than real purpose as there wasn’t much to inventory in the first place. She’d seen plenty of blaster wounds, and many worse than Cassian’s, but the sight of his burned and bloodied side sent Jyn’s stomach into knots.

Cassian’s eyes darkened. “Any intel they could get out of us would benefit them. Besides, we had access to the entire Citadel databank. Who knows what else we could have stolen.”

In that moment, Jyn wished they had had the wherewithal to steal something else. But it was all moot now, as the Citadel and the entire planet were nothing but a heap of rubble. Jyn was hit with another wave of nausea at the thought and everything around her turned grey at the edges. She thought Cassian might have been saying something to her, but all she could hear was the rapid beat of her heart pounding in her ears.

Before she knew what she was doing, Jyn stood numbly and left Cassian with Kaytoo, who was still prodding at his master’s wounds with disinfectant, and moved to explore the rest of the ship. 

There wasn’t much else to it - it was smaller than Rogue One’s stolen Imperial cargo shuttle, with only one deck. She passed the smallest refresher she’d ever seen, little more than a closet with a small toilet and basin. Beyond that were the sleeping quarters, equally tiny. The room was dark, with a single sterile cot and storage cupboard crammed into the corner. Jyn hauled the bedding from the cot - white, Imperial military-grade, rough and practical, with little comfort, but she’d slept on worse. Her hands had begun to shake and she was desperate for a few moments alone, a few moments to hide. But she knew this would be the first place Cassian would look to find her. 

Jyn felt drawn back to the cave on Lah’mu, to when she was seven years old, waiting for Saw to come and find her. She’d grown to hate that cave - it was nothing more than a mental prison anymore, where she tucked away her darkest memories, the secrets she needed to bury in order to function, in order to simply survive. But now, Jyn was sure she was living in her darkest memories, making new ones that made her long for those glimpses of her mother’s smile, her father’s soothing voice. It was all she could do to pull the bedding from the sleeping quarters, move across the cramped hall, and slide open the door to what she realized was a small, hot engine room, where she collapsed in a heap on the floor.

She wanted to cry and scream with the wave of anguish that was rushing up to envelope her. She knew that somewhere in the back of her mind she had felt elation at their victory, but in the ugly light of their survival, it felt hollow and nebulous, like a dream she’d had so many times that she could never be sure what was real.

Her body screamed with tension, with the need to lash out - at that awful man in white, at the Empire that had killed her friends -  _ Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze,  _ the entire Rogue One squadron, the only loyal friends she’d ever had, at her father and Saw, who’d returned to her in the briefest, most painful moments, only to be snatched away forever - but she had nowhere to go now, and more importantly, no energy left to spend. In the heat and white noise of the engine room, Jyn held the rough blanket to her mouth and screamed. 

She screamed until her already damaged throat could do nothing more than gasp silently as she caught her breath and willed her heart to slow its heavy pounding. Now along with her body, her eyes ached in their sockets. No matter how desperately she willed it, no matter how hard she tried, her tears refused to fall.

* * *

When Jyn had wandered off, face blank and eyes hunted, Cassian held himself back from following her. He could still feel the fabric of her shirt beneath his hands, and knew that if he followed her now he would have to fight the urge to clutch her to him - to feel her heart beating beneath his palm, to feel her lungs expanding, to simply feel  _ life _ . 

Sitting in the pilot’s seat, Cassian stretched out his aching hands. Kaytoo had tended to them, along with his blaster wound and badly bruised but thankfully unbroken legs and ribs, but even cleaned of the dirt and blood, he could still see the inflammation in his palms where he had dug the small crescents of his nails hard into his flesh. Cassian shook his head in an attempt to clear it from the flash of images running like blaster fire behind his eyelids. The sickly green beam of the Death Star coursing across the sky, the earth exploding in massive waves, the surf rising up to swallow them. 

“Where are we, Kay?” he asked, more for the distraction than because he really wanted to know. They’d set a course for as far from Scarif as they could get, as far from the rebel base as they could get - anything that would lead them and any potential tails away from the plans. Cassian knew he needed to know their next move -  _ they _ needed to know - but when he’d tried to broach the subject with Jyn, she had grown distant and pale before leaving the room without a word. He couldn’t blame her; at the moment all of Cassian’s nerves were frayed, too. He barely heard Kaytoo when the droid answered his question.

“This route will take us into the Unknown Regions,” Kay told him, and his vocal circuits sounded almost gentle. “I highly suggest you get some sleep, Cassian. We still have another couple hours of hyperspace travel. I will alert you immediately should we run into any danger.”

Cassian trusted Kaytoo with his life - he’d done so for as long as he’d known him. That’s what happened when you reprogrammed a droid yourself. Or at least, that was what Cassian had done. In the eight years since he’d built Kaytoo from a stolen Imperial security droid, he’d never had a reason to doubt him. That didn’t mean Cassian didn’t have questions for the droid. Kaytoo was being particularly evasive on the topic of his rescue mission, but Cassian would save that conversation when he had more energy for real conversation.

Instead, he took Kaytoo up on his offer to rest without a second thought, too exhausted to protest. He searched the small confines of the shuttle and felt a creeping panic when he did not immediately find Jyn. The sleeping cabin’s small cot was empty, nothing more than a raised padded pallet stripped of bedding. Having barely left Jyn’s side over the course of the last...how long had it been? Days? Weeks? Cassian knew their time together was short compared to the rest of his life spent with the Alliance, but he had a difficult time remembering what it felt like to be without her steady presence beside him. Without her there, he felt unmoored, and that scared him more than just about anything.

As he turned to return to the cockpit, his eyes fell on the door to another room. The insignia at the top of the door marked it as the engine room, and he knew that that must be Jyn’s hiding spot - there was simply nowhere else she could be. Before he could slide the door open, Cassian paused, suddenly unsure. He knew what he would find behind it, and he wasn’t sure he could face that. While he craved the physical contact of life next to him, he wasn’t sure he could face Jyn with his sudden dependency. 

If he didn’t open that door, though, Cassian would be left with nothing but a cryptic Kaytoo and his own thoughts for company and, selfish as it was, those were thoughts he was sure he was not ready to face. Not when the moment his eyes closed he was met with the stuff that not even a lifetime of resistance fighting had prepared him for. He finally came to a decision, and entered the room. When the door closed behind him with a soft hiss, Cassian found Jyn asleep in a heap of pale bed clothes, no doubt scavenged from the cabin’s single pallet. She was tangled amid the blankets, boots caught roughly at the fabric while her fingers grasped at the edges, held tightly to her chest. She had pulled herself into a fetal position in the corner - as protected as she could get herself, facing her only exit. The position was more defensive than comfortable and she slept fitfully.

Cassian slid down to the floor and watched her eyes as they moved frantically beneath her lids. After a few moments, her movements became more fraught, and a deep furrow creased her brow. She mumbled something unintelligible. When Cassian focused, he could catch snippets of words and phrases:  _ please, papa...trust...the force…wait... _

She had drifted back into silence and was still for a long while. Cassian’s eyes grew heavy and he’d begun to drift off when suddenly Jyn shrieked. The sound was like a blaster bolt to the spine. Before he could think about what he was doing, Cassian was surging forward toward her, hand flying to Jyn’s shoulder. Her cry became garbled and frantic at the touch, but before Cassian could pull away her eyes snapped open, accompanied by a strangled gasp. In an instant, she ripped Cassian’s hand from her shoulder, lunging toward him in a flurry of limbs. She landed heavily on top of him, pinning him to the floor. He held back a gasp of pain. His blaster wound was on the mend with the help of the bacta patches Kaytoo had applied, but it was still tender. Above him, Jyn’s eyes gleamed with fear, hazy and unseeing in the dim room.

“Jyn,” Cassian said, low but insistent. “Jyn, it’s me.”

Jyn’s eyes slowly cleared and focused. She blinked rapidly down at Cassian as if trying to piece together the reality she found herself in. She then lifted her eyes to look around her, head moving wildly to take in her surroundings.

“Jyn,” Cassian repeated softly, and when her eyes met his again, her face crumpled.

“ _ Cassian? _ ” her voice was brittle and small, a sound Cassian had never heard from her, and which sent his stomach into knots. Jyn Erso had never sounded so fragile or uncertain. 

“Yes, it’s me,” he said. “We’re…” He wanted to say  _ okay _ , but that wasn’t true, he knew. “We made it.” It sounded hollow and stupid to his ears.

“ _ Cassian _ ,” she repeated, the name a slur over her tongue, and Cassian wasn’t sure if she had heard him at all. As if invisible strings had been cut, as if she simply had no more strength to hold herself up, Jyn pitched forward against Cassian’s chest. Her hands grasped his shirt and she sucked in a shaky breath. Cassian reached up to wrap his arms around her and Jyn let out a muffled wail that wracked her entire frame, letting loose a tumult of guttural sobs against his shirt.

The sound was such intimate grief that Cassian felt like an intruder, and could do nothing but hold her tighter against him. Lying there in the small confines of the engine room, he felt his own resolve cracking, his long-standing defenses weakening in the wake of Jyn’s naked pain. An ache began at his temples and across his brow, which he did not recognize as the welling of tears until they were already streaking unbidden out of the corners of his eyes.

Cassian’s breath shook and his hands trembled where they held fast to Jyn’s back. He moved them to her nape, where he smoothed her tangled hair and glimpsed a flash of a memory of her hands carding through his own hair, though it felt distant and dreamlike. At the new contact between them, Jyn lifted her head, face mottled red and eyes puffy. For a fleeting moment, Cassian thought he must have made a mistake, that she was about to retreat again, but instead she leaned down again and pressed her lips to his.

The contact was rough and Jyn tasted like ash and salt, but the weight of her grounded Cassian. His hands found her hair again and he couldn’t help but pull her closer to him, anything to close the space between them, anything to feel the solid heat of Jyn’s living, breathing body against his.

Jyn gasped against his mouth and Cassian took the chance to deepen the kiss. But he didn’t get far before she was nipping at his lower lip - hard enough to draw a small shocked breath from him before she eased off, lapping at the bite with her tongue for a moment before tracing her lips along his jaw. He couldn’t help the rough groan that escaped his lips as he thought,  _ even when she’s kissing, she’s fighting _ . 

Jyn took his reaction as permission to continue, and she leaned down again, this time raking her hands through his hair and levering herself up onto one elbow so she could look down at him. Her tears had slowed, but the fire in her eyes was as bright and fierce as ever, so bright Cassian felt he’d be consumed by them if he didn’t look away. But he couldn’t look away, couldn’t do anything but tip his head up hungrily to meet hers again.

Cassian wrapped his arms tightly around her again and Jyn let him pull her back down against him, where their legs tangled together in an awkward shuffle of boots. Without breaking contact with his mouth, Jyn somehow managed to kick one boot off, and then the other, before settling back against him and letting her hips grind purposefully against his.

In his years fighting and spying for the Alliance, Cassian had shared various beds and nights, but the trysts rarely lasted long before his assignments ended or his partners asked too many questions. He’d never let himself feel anything beyond the immediate physical needs of sex. Emotions were dangerous in his line of work, and letting himself get caught unawares was all but deadly.

But now, with his future uncertain, with his own survival a sheer mystery he had yet to understand, Cassian could not bring himself to be careful or distant with Jyn. This woman, whom he had been so sure he would die next to in a blast of kyber-generated destruction, was an anomaly. He’d never met someone who could move him from cold distrust to the deepest faith and loyalty that she had evoked in him in a matter of days. He’d never let himself get close to anyone who would draw undue attention to him, but Jyn - she was like gravity.

As she ground her hips into his, Cassian bucked up to meet hers, letting the contact run electric down his spine, across every inch of his skin, to the tips of his hair. He snaked a leg over one of Jyn’s hips and held them together as they both frantically found purchase against each other. After a few moments, Jyn pulled away with a frayed and frustrated groan. Cassian tried to gather his bearings, tried to think of something to say to keep her from leaving, but he didn’t have to. Before he could sit up fully, she was sitting back on her knees making quick work of undoing the clasp of her trousers and gracelessly sliding them down her thighs. As she wiggled out of them fully, Cassian let his gaze trace the landscape of old and new bruising against milky skin from where they snaked beneath the edges of her panties across the tops of her thighs and down to her ankles. Jyn Erso could take a beating, but she had yet to show a single sign of breaking.

Cassian tugged at his own belt and quickly kicked off his boots as Jyn pulled her shirt off over her head, leaving only her kyber crystal necklace against her breastbone. He’d shucked his trousers by the time she knelt back down, and Jyn straddled his hips, pulling at his shirt until Cassian sat up and she could tug it over his shoulders to join hers on the floor, gentle enough to avoid his bandaged side. 

She kissed him again, held his face in her hands - and even though she was the one on his lap, Cassian felt cradled and protected by her. He kissed back with growing urgency. Though he’d only found her sleeping fitfully a short while ago, their shared touches felt like they’d been drawn out over hours, and if left alone could turn into days and weeks and years. 

As Cassian slid his fingers against Jyn’s skin, around the ridges of her ribs up to the swell of her breasts, he let his instincts take over, let the war of emotion fall to the background. Jyn sighed into Cassian’s mouth at the touch and ground down into him again. Cassian groaned as his erection finally received some unfettered attention. At his reaction, Jyn reached down between them and stroked him - careful at first, almost gentle. Not tentative, but inquisitive.

As he was learning to expect from Jyn, when she knew what she wanted, she wasted no time in getting it. After a few moments of even, sure strokes, Jyn rose up onto her knees and positioned herself before sinking down onto him. The tight heat of her surrounding him was almost more than Cassian could take. He reached a hand up to trace a thumb over Jyn’s cheek, where it was still marked with fresh tear tracks and old scrapes. When he looked her in the eye, the fire still burned bright in her eyes. She did not break eye contact with him as he shifted beneath her, building a rhythm. 

Jyn held tight to his shoulders as she met him thrust for thrust, forehead coming down to meet his, breath mingling with his as they both came closer and closer to the edge. Jyn’s grip tightened and her breath hitched as she came, and Cassian held her tightly as he followed, all coherent thought leaving him, replaced by pure sensation. 

For a single moment, they could forget - who they were, where they were, and everyone and everything they had lost.

* * *

When Cassian awoke, at first he could not tell where he was. He was warm and the ache in his body had receded into the background. When he opened his eyes, it was to the dim light of the engine room and the memories of the hours before flooded back. He was slightly surprised to see that Jyn had stayed - he’d half expected her to flee, but he realized that in the short time they’d spent together, Cassian could not say that he  _ knew _ her beyond the blind conviction she elicited from him, beyond the pure belief he’d placed in her as a figurehead of the rebellion. Now, he could see the woman in front of him, the one who had smiled at him atop the Citadel tower, letting him see a glimpse of Jyn stripped of her symbolic aura, simply human.

Next to him, Jyn was awake, sitting up against the bulkhead, hair in disarray and blanket wrapped loosely around her bare chest. Cassian’s gaze was drawn to the strafe of mottled bruises across her shoulder and collarbones, and the string of the kyber crystal that hung around her neck and disappeared beneath the blanket where he knew it sat between her breasts.

Jyn cast him a brief look and a small smile before returning her attention to something in her hands. She was tying knots of fabric together - strips she’d torn from one of the blankets, Cassian thought. It was in the shape of a person - a doll, Cassian realized, and his gaze softened as he took in this part of Jyn that was so new to him.

“My mother used to make these for me,” she told him, holding up the figure. “Well, they were much better than this - properly sewn and dyed. I never left home without them.”

Jyn tugged at one of the arms, smoothing the fabric between deft, callused fingers. “First it was Beeny - Mama gave him to me for company when we were on Coruscant. Then there was Stormy on Lah’mu. But I lost him…”

Jyn’s eyes grew distant and Cassian pictured a little girl with dark curls and sharp inquisitive eyes carrying around her trusty friend on her many adventures. He envied her the innocence, though he knew that it surely had not lasted long once she’d joined Saw Guerrera.

“What will you name this one?” Cassian asked her.

Jyn was quiet for a long time, and Cassian thought she wouldn’t answer. When she finally did speak, her voice was filled with a warm crackle of fire, like glowing embers. 

“I think I’ll name him Bodhi,” she said with a small tremble of lips before she tied a final knot and held him up for Cassian to see.

Cassian felt a sharp pang in his chest at the mention of Bodhi’s name, and was startled by the feeling. Over the years he’d let himself become hardened against death, especially those of his fallen comrades - if he didn’t, he’d never have survived. But something about Bodhi’s death, and about Baze and Chirrut’s, too - felt different. Maybe it was because they hadn’t been soldiers. They had fought, though, with more heart than Cassian had grown used to after so many years in the thick of a war.

Beside him, Jyn was watching Cassian, lashes laced with tears as they had the night before. He realized she wanted him to take the doll, so he did, cupping it between his palms, as if he could protect it the way he’d been unable to protect Bodhi in the end.

Before he could say anything else, before he could thank Jyn, the walls around them began to tremble and the floor bucked beneath them.  _ Not again _ , Cassian thought. He shared a brief steely look with Jyn before they leapt to their feet. Cassian was pulling on his shirt and buckling his belt when the door slid open and Kaytoo loomed in the doorway.

“We’ve approached an anomalous gravitational field. The nav is malfunctioning and I have no data on our location on this hyperspace route,” he said, looking to Cassian expectantly before sliding his gaze to Jyn, who was pulling her shirt on, followed by her battered vest. Before the droid could make any number of pointed comments, Cassian pushed past him to the cockpit. Kaytoo and Jyn were fast on his heels. 

Kay resumed his seat as Cassian took in the readings on his display.

“What were  _ you _ doing?” Kaytoo asked pointedly in the brief silence.

“Not now!” Cassian said sharply, and was surprised to hear Jyn’s voice echo the same behind him.

* * *

“Where are we?” Jyn asked as Cassian and Kaytoo settled into the pilot seats. Outside the viewport, stars streaked past them through dizzying hyperspace.

“While you two were  _ sleeping _ ,” Kaytoo said and Jyn refrained from rolling her eyes. If she’d had a blaster handy, she’d have threatened him with it. “We entered the Unknown Regions as planned. But the hyperspace route I had logged appears to have been inaccurate, and I cannot get a read on our exact location.”

The mention of inaccurate hyperspace routes pricked a memory at the back of Jyn’s mind. She thought she remembered hearing myths about a part of the galaxy where hyperdrive malfunctioned, where only the most skilled pilots could successfully navigate. At the time, she’d been living as Tanith Pontha, smuggling her way across the galaxy with a band out of Tatooine. At the time, she’d thought them nothing more than spooky stories told to children, but she remembered what they’d called it. 

“The Tangle,” Jyn murmured to herself as she tried to recall details, but Cassian turned his head at the name.

“What --” he started, but suddenly the ship lurched violently. Jyn almost lost her footing, and reached out for a handhold as another shudder wracked the ship’s frame. Cassian gripped the console and reached for the hyperdrive. “I’m pulling us out of hyperspace, Kay. We can’t keep going without the nav working or we could end up hundreds of lightyears off course.”

Kaytoo’s head swiveled around to look at Cassian, “How do we get off course if we don’t know where we’re going in the first place?”

Cassian ignored the droid as he pulled them out of hyperspace. Outside the viewport, Jyn could see they were nearing a planet. It was surprisingly blue and verdant for so far out in the wilderness of space. Jyn didn’t recognize it, though she’d never been this far out in the galaxy before. 

As they neared the unknown planet, Cassian tried to steer them into orbit, keeping them far enough out to avoid entering the atmosphere. Suddenly a sensor flared to life on the dashboard, blinking urgently.

“What’s happening?” Jyn asked as the ship continued to vibrate around them.

“I don’t know! I’m losing control! Reverse the thrusters, Kay.”

“Reversing thrusters.”

Cassian gripped his controls hard, trying to regain any distance they could, but nothing worked. Something was pulling them in, and fast. As Jyn moved away from the cockpit to secure herself in one of the ship’s two passenger seats, the ship bucked and shuddered again, sending Jyn flying across the cabin. She cried out as she landed against the floor and a jolt of pain shot up her right ankle.

“Jyn?!” Cassian shouted from the cockpit. Jyn hauled herself across the floor on her knees and wrapped her arm through a secured seat strap.

“I’m fine,” she cried back, breathing hard through the pain as she watched them enter the atmosphere through the viewport. “Try to set us down!” She looked down at her ankle where she held it off the floor. It throbbed painfully in her boot, but she couldn’t tell what the damage was beneath the leg of her trousers. Around her the cabin only shook harder and she vaguely thought they’d never escape a life of stolen freighter ships falling apart around them.

The klaxon she’d woken up to before began blaring again in earnest and Jyn held on tighter to her handhold. She tried to get a glimpse out the viewport again, but all she could see was darkness streaming past them.

“Pull up!” Kaytoo urged. 

“I’m trying!” Cassian yelled back.

The ship banked suddenly and Jyn’s grip slipped. 

“Hold on, Jyn!” Cassian yelled, and Jyn was hit with another sense of deja vu, of wind and rain and darkness. “We’re coming in hard.”

Jyn fumbled with the restraint, but before she could secure herself the world seemed to tilt, and she was suspended in air for a moment before everything crashed down around her in a roar of sound and pain.


	2. Chapter 2

When Jyn woke again, it was to darkness and humidity, and this time everything was quiet. She’d grown used to equating her need to panic with the amount of chaos around her; the barrage to her senses was always enough to send her leaping into action, enough to focus her. Now, though, everything was dark and forebodingly silent.

Of course, she noticed this all in the span of a few seconds before one sense she _could_ still feel came roaring back to life in the form of excruciating pain. It was a sickening electric throb from her foot that shot all the way up to her knee. Jyn had always been taught to remain quiet in unknown situations. It was the best tactic for survival she knew - one she’d learned at a very young age from her mother and again when she was older from Saw. But this time, her body was rebelling and she could not hold back the hoarse cry that escaped her lips. As soon as she uttered it, Jyn clamped both hands over her mouth as a roil of nausea washed over her.

Somewhere nearby, she heard a rough gasp and a sudden shift of fabric.

“Jyn?!”

It was Cassian, she realized, and reality settled back into place as she remembered where she was and who she was with. She closed her eyes tight then, against the pain and the wash of memory.

Jyn had learned to accept even the strangest of circumstances over the course of her relatively short life, and she’d discovered quickly that the only way to survive was to set things aside, to tuck them away to be dealt with later. She’d always used her cave to hide away the worst of it - the cave where her father had built that god-awful makeshift bunker, where she’d grown up _playing_ , only to spend the worst moments of her life there, waiting to die or be rescued, whichever came first. Since her father had built it, the bunker in her cave was sturdy, made to withstand attacks, made to keep her safe inside and the darkness outside.  Just like everything Galen had done, it was an honorable intention, and it had done its job. But Jyn could not hide forever, and after her father was gone, after she’d left the bunker and its safety behind, she’d filled it instead with all her darkest memories - her mother’s death, her father’s abandonment, her first kill at thirteen, Saw’s retreating back when he’d left her at sixteen. Now, though, there was just so much more, so much hurt and death that Jyn needed to put down there, but she wasn’t sure if there was any room.

“Here,” she shouted weakly to Cassian, swallowing everything down and focusing on what was in front of her. She could hear him fumbling around the cockpit for a few moments before suddenly there was a burst of light - so bright in the darkness that Jyn thought she might go blind. As her eyes slowly adjusted, she saw Cassian’s stark face illuminated by a small torch.

* * *

Cassian had always considered himself a proficient pilot. He was no Bodhi Rook or Wedge Antilles, but in the Alliance, if you couldn’t wear multiple hats you were practically useless - not to mention a liability. Flying through hyperspace in the wilds of the Unknown Regions pushed Cassian’s not-inconsiderable skills to the limits, and they _still_ weren’t enough.

He’d heard Jyn muttering about the Tangle an instant before he realized what was happening and he knew there was no way he’d safely be able to navigate them, especially with their nav malfunctioning. He’d heard the stories of a stretch of deadly hyperspace on the outer edges of the known galaxy, but never from anyone who’d been there, and that was more telling than anything. Kaytoo was picking up his slack, but the ship shuddered violently around them as they were continuously pulled by an unseen force.

On Kaytoo’s mark, Cassian successfully pulled the ship out of hyperspace using a vague estimation, pulled from an old map that likely predated the Empire. As they slowed with another shudder, a small planet came into view. Behind him, Cassian heard Jyn cry out and his pulse spiked at the sound as the ship continued to fight against his controls.

Cassian had thought they were in the clear, that the mess of their hyperspace route was the end of their immediate danger, but as they neared the planet - surprisingly verdant at the equator with large swaths of mountains to the north and a patch of barren desert to the south - they were pulled into orbit with more force than expected.

They were coming in at a dangerous angle and each maneuver Cassian tried, each adjustment he made, only made the ship shudder even more dangerously around them.

“If we attempt a landing on this planet, we have a 68% chance of death,” Kaytoo stated.

“We’ve worked with worse odds,” Cassian growled as they hurtled through the atmosphere. “Besides, if we don’t land, we will fall out of the sky anyway.” They were on the dark side of the planet now and Cassian saw almost no signs of civilization save a pinprick or two to the north.

“There is a 100% chance of injury - likely severe,” Kay shot back. Cassian tried to put the statistic out of his mind and his thoughts instead turned unbidden to the sound of Jyn’s yell. It took all of his strength not to turn around and see her, to catch her eye to _know_ that she was okay.

“Pull up!” Kay urged and Cassian refocused, pulling up on the controls on instinct, scraping their hull on an unseen boulder in the darkness. In front of him, Cassian saw a large outcropping of forest. He was reminded of the unpredictable canyons of Eadu as he hugged the side of an impossibly high cliff to avoid getting snarled in the rough sprawl of trees.

Suddenly the cliff face jutted out in front of them and Cassian banked to the right, but he had nowhere to go but into the trees. Branches clawed at the hull and Cassian white-knuckled his controls as he avoided colliding with any tree trunks. Around him, an alarm was blaring and Kaytoo was shouting again.

Cassian could just make out the edge of the forest, and thought that _finally_ they were in the clear when a pair of tall standing stones he had mistaken for young trees were immediately in front of them. With an ear-shattering shriek of metal, the sides of their ship were torn, folding in on themselves like thin aluminum.

Wind and smoke flooded the cabin, whipping at Cassian’s hair and clothes as he tried to ease them into a landing. As they hit land, the ship skidded across a bank of grassy earth, throwing up soil and gravel against the viewport. Cassian’s vision went hazy around the edges as his teeth rattled in his jaw.

When they slowed to a complete stop, Cassian could only hear the sound of his heart and the ringing of adrenaline in his ears. Through the haze, Cassian suddenly heard a muffled cry that could only be Jyn, and his heart seized again. This time, he moved immediately to find her. He gasped at the tenderness of his skin, chafed raw against his seat restraints, as he hastily removed them.

The landing had dug the nose of the ship into the earth so only a faint hint of starlight seeped into the practically pitch-black ship.

“That’s odd,” Kaytoo said from the pilot’s seat, where he was unbuckling his restraints. “The emergency lights should have activated.” Cassian blinked against the darkness, willing his eyes to adjust as he shuffled around the cockpit until his hand found what he was looking for - a torch.

As he stumbled into the ship’s main cabin, he shone his light around until it landed on Jyn, sitting stock-still against a bulkhead, face pale and sweaty and eyes blazing in suppressed pain. The sight sent a shock of ice down Cassian’s spine. She’d been battered and bruised on Scarif, but this was something else entirely.

“What happened?” he asked, swallowing down the panic in his voice. Jyn shut her eyes tightly and shook her head quickly back and forth in short bursts. Cassian moved his torch down her body, looking for clues to assess her injuries. He was not a squeamish man, but when the light landed on her right ankle, his stomach turned over at the sight. It sat at an unnatural angle, unmistakably fractured, and Cassian was sure it would be swelling beyond their control if he didn’t get her boot off soon. But the moment he moved toward it, Jyn growled.

“Don’t,” she said. The vicious flash of her eyes was diminished by the weak thread of her voice.

“We can’t just leave it like that. That’s a severe fracture. It needs to be set,” Cassian told her, trying to keep his voice low and even, though all he wanted to do was yell. Not at Jyn - her stubborn resolve was the only reason they had succeeded on Scarif, the only way they could have gathered such a ragtag team to help them. No, Cassian wanted to yell at everything that had gotten in their way, that had left so many dead, yet had spared them only to strand them, injured and alone in some backwater wilderness.

Instead he took a steadying breath and turned to search for Kaytoo. The droid was still in the cockpit, where Cassian could just barely see a mess of wires protruding from the console.

“Kay, I need the medkit,” he said curtly, and the droid turned swiftly to take in the sight of Jyn against the bulkhead and Cassian at her feet. When Cassian turned back to Jyn, she was taking shallow breaths that would do her no good against the pain. Cassian vaguely heard Kaytoo moving behind them, but he focused on Jyn. He moved out of his crouch to kneel in front of her, and reached out a hand to Jyn’s shoulder.

He knew the pain she was feeling - it pricked an old memory that Cassian had buried under years and years of survival, but now he realized it must have been his own first taste of pain. He’d been a child, barely five years old, climbing the foothills of the village. It was one of his few memories of Fest, of his mother and sister. He remembers glimpses of craggy foothills, the icy wind in his face, a brief course of exhilaration through his veins, as much as a young child could feel. It was a mix of wonder and fear, all before he had tumbled at the sudden sound of starfighters streaming past, firing overhead, and his mother screaming his name, as he had fallen, breaking his leg against the rocks. When he’d woken, some undeterminable time later, his leg was healed, but his family was gone.

Cassian pulled himself from the memory as Kaytoo returned with the medkit, and shone a brighter light down on them. Built directly into his chassis, it flooded the cabin with a pale white light.  Cassian felt his stomach drop at the sight. He had examined every inch of K-2SO when he’d reprogrammed the KX unit eight years ago. He had never seen that light before, and Cassian knew for a fact that it had never been a part of Kay’s hardware.

He added the fact to his ever growing list of things to ask the droid about their escape, before returning his attention to Jyn. As Cassian’s eyes adjusted to the new source of light, he rummaged through the medkit to take a look at their supplies - a couple bacta patches left, along with some simple gauze and bandages. He lifted the small bottle of painkillers and cursed at the sound of just a few rattling around. Whoever’s ship they’d lifted had practically depleted their supplies. Cassian pulled the bottle out of the kit, nonetheless. He’d save them for Jyn after the leg was set - she’d need them more then. As he set the kit down to the side and looked up to Jyn, he noticed that her eyes were glassy and her face shone with sweat. She was going into shock, Cassian realized.

“Kay,” he said, turning to the droid. “The engine room - there’s a blanket.” He reached out to Jyn’s shoulders again, rubbing at them gently, both to rouse her from her stupor and provide a modicum of heat. Jyn blinked at the contact and her eyes lost some of their glazed look. As Kay returned with the blanket in hand, Cassian was grateful that the droid knew when his seriousness was required rather than simply appreciated. Kaytoo carefully draped the blanket around Jyn’s shoulders and Cassian pulled it tight.

“Jyn,” he said, but Jyn didn’t respond. Instead her eyes drifted to look up at Kaytoo curiously. “ _Jyn!_ ” Cassian repeated louder, and this time she startled slightly, blinking and jerking her head at the sound. She muffled a strangled cry behind her hand as the movement had jostled her leg.

“We gotta get this boot off,” Cassian said to her, trying to keep her attention focused. He reached down into his own boot where he kept a small vibroblade. This time, Jyn let him near her ankle without a word, but her eyes had cleared some more and she watched closely as he cut away the fabric of her trousers up to her knee. He was gentle and her stillness, while worrying in its own right, made it easier to work quickly. That was the easy part, though, and he wouldn’t fool himself into thinking she would be so docile for what was to come.

“You’re doing great, Jyn,” he said softly, and was strangely relieved when she huffed out a dark chuckle. When he met her eyes they were fully lucid again and she reached up to pull the blanket closer around her shoulders - if not for warmth then for a small shred of comfort.

Cassian sat back from her leg for a moment and undid his belt, pulling it from the loops around his waist. Jyn managed a quirk of her eyebrows and Cassian hoped that Kaytoo’s light didn’t catch the blush that was creeping up his neck and cheeks. Their encounter in the engine room felt like it had happened days ago rather than mere hours, and Cassian hadn’t had a second to process it beyond their brief moments of afterglow before everything had gone to hell - _yet again_.

Compartmentalization was a fact of life. It was a skill Cassian had learned at a very young age, and he had only come to do it better and better the longer he’d worked in Alliance Intelligence. Usually it was deaths like Tivik’s - betrayals that had come to seem small and necessary under the weight of the Alliance’s needs. Galen Erso’s death would have fallen into that category, too, and would have been sealed away behind thick durasteel doors with all the rest, to be examined later, once he stopped for breath. Sometimes later never came, and sometimes later came in the dead of night, when the flash of blaster fire behind Cassian’s eyes roused him from what little light sleep he’d managed to get.

It was rare, Cassian realized, for there to be _good_ memories that he needed to hide away. He didn’t want his time with Jyn - _any_ of it - to get buried like the others. It didn’t belong there. Instead, he simply needed those memories safe, protected from the chaos until he could think about them, unhindered.

Cassian pushed down the thoughts - her pale skin mottled with bruising, the feeling of her strong in his arms - and focused on the task at hand.  He folded the belt in half, sobering once more as he handed it to Jyn. She took it, but held it in her lap, making no move to use it.

“This will probably hurt worse than when I set it,” Cassian told her, reaching down to begin loosening the laces atop her foot as gently as he could. Jyn audibly swallowed and her eyes unfocused. “The painkillers will help later, but I’m afraid we don’t have anything strong enough to help now.”

“This isn’t my first broken bone,” Jyn gritted out between clenched teeth. The statement didn’t surprise Cassian - he was sure her time with the Partisans had not left her without her fair share of injuries over the years. But he very much doubted she’d broken anything quite like this. Unless she’d had easy access to bacta immersion tanks, which he highly doubted, then she’d never have survived this long with poorly healed fractures.

“Ready?” Cassian asked her. Jyn took a long steadying breath and reluctantly tucked the belt between her teeth. Cassian told himself that the knot of dread that had settled low in his stomach was one of sympathy, but he knew that, in reality, he wanted nothing more than to never have to hear Jyn’s screams of pain again. Yet he would hear them at least twice more before they cleared this hurdle. She was stronger than anyone he knew, but the human body could only endure so much in silence.

Next to him, Kaytoo reached out a hand to steady Jyn’s calf. Cassian was grateful for the extra hand and knew the droid was trying his hardest to stay quiet against his natural instincts - however natural a droid’s programmed instincts could be. He was sure the moment Jyn’s leg was set, Kaytoo would be back to his old self, spewing his probabilities and thinly veiled barbs. The thought gave Cassian a small surge of renewed vigor as he gripped the heel of Jyn’s boot with one hand and the sole with the other.

She nodded grimly around the belt in her mouth.

“Hold her steady, Kay,” Cassian said, and with one swift motion he pulled the boot free. Jyn’s ragged cries were muffled by the leather and once the boot slipped past her toes she was silent except for the sound of her heavy breathing. Cassian let her catch her breath, watched her wipe away a drip of sweat that coursed down the side of her face.

“It’s almost over,” he told her. The sound of her laugh this time was high and desperate.

“No, it’s not,” she said, shaking her head shortly. “It’ll take weeks to heal without a bacta immersion, and I don’t think we’re gonna come across a fully equipped medbay any time soon. If that smoke was anything to go by, this ship is shot to shite, and our best chance of getting off this rock, or hell, even surviving at all, is reconnaissance on foot. I’ll do nothing but slow you down.” When she fell silent, her eyes shone with unshed tears and helpless frustration.

“One step at a time,” Cassian said after she’d finished her rant. He knew her nerves were frayed. They had both reached their limit at the top of the citadel tower on Scarif, and had passed it as they’d watched the Death Star prepare to destroy them. They’d barely had a moment to stop and assess, and it was taking its toll. More often than not, Cassian lived his life that way. Sometimes it was the only way he could live to see another day. He knew Jyn knew this way of life, too, and so he parroted her own words back at her. “We’ll take this chance, and the next, on and on, until...”

“On and on, until...” Jyn said softly and their voices mingled in a way that sent a jolt of warmth to Cassian’s chest. He ignored the fact that they’d both drifted off at the end, neither sure what would come after _until. Until what?_ Cassian buried that thought for later, too, and instead met Jyn’s eyes. She blinked and Cassian thought he might just see those thoughts churning behind her eyes, too. But she said nothing else, instead simply nodded slowly.

“Cassian may not be a doctor, but he has set at least four bones in the field,” Kay said quietly. “In your current condition, I’d say you have an 85% chance of making a full recovery.” Cassian looked up at the comment - practically words of comfort coming from Kaytoo. The droid had never spoken to Jyn before with anything but rote professionalism or thinly veiled contempt when the moment allowed.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Jyn said, and Cassian could see the vague surprise in her eyes even beneath the pain. “Let’s just get this over with.”

* * *

Jyn was no stranger to pain - she’d taken her fair share of blaster fire while running with the Partisans, she’d broken her arm at age nine during combat drilling with Saw, and her collarbone at fourteen. But none of that could prepare her for the pain of moving her broken ankle. It was like someone was stabbing white hot pokers up and down her shin. Cassian must think her so fragile, Jyn thought. She was so tired, her body was still protesting all its recent beatings, and everything was coming to the forefront, crowding her headspace, making her vision narrow to a point.

She could hear Saw in her head, telling her to breathe through the pain, to focus it, to use it to her advantage. But none of that was useful to her now, where she had no one and nothing to focus her pain on except Kaytoo or Cassian. Cassian who had come back for her - on Jedha, on Eadu, on Scarif. He would be an easy target for her frustration, but as Jyn sat on the floor of their wrecked ship, broken leg splayed out in front of her, sweat and tears running in rivulets down her face in equal measure, Cassian spoke to her in soothing tones, watching her in the dim glow of the cabin’s light. She had never heard Cassian speak like that before, soft and warm, empty reassurances that still managed to calm her. She was reminded of a vague memory of her mother, Lyra’s soft voice in her ear, fingertips brushing stray tears from her cheeks. It was so fleeting, Jyn thought it might have just been something she’d dreamed once.

Even Kaytoo had reassured her with statistics she was sure must be fake, so either the droid had finally changed his mind about her, or else Jyn really was a pathetic sight in front of them. Instead of honing her pain like a vibroblade, something that Lianna and Tanith and Kestrel would have done, she clutched at her kyber crystal, feeling its warmth against her chest spread to her fingers, and letting it steady her.

When she opened her eyes again, Jyn nodded to Cassian and once more gripped his belt and placed it between her teeth.

“Hold it steady, Kay,” Cassian muttered and Jyn watched as he looked closely at her bare foot, swollen and bruised with ugly deep purple around the ball of her ankle, before he took it between his hands and tugged sharply. The pain was like acid and lightening, and it was over almost before she could fully process it. The surge of adrenaline left her feeling sick and dizzy. Jyn gasped and gagged around the belt, sucking in lungfuls of air. As her stomach settled, she realized that the pain she’d felt before, the angry hot pokers up and down her shin, had subsided, and she was left with a dull ache that throbbed with her heartbeat.

When she opened her eyes, the ceiling had stopped spinning, and Jyn saw that Cassian and Kaytoo were digging around their meager medpack. The droid handed Cassian a length of cloth bandage, which he began to wrap around her leg. Cassian muttered something to Kaytoo that she could not hear, and the droid stood and wandered off, taking his light with him. Cassian’s small torch sat on the floor next to him and he turned it on its end so it cast its light up, throwing his face into sharp shadows.

“Kay’s going to find something to splint your ankle with,” Cassian said.

“I wouldn’t have thought an Intelligence officer would have had so many opportunities to set bones,” Jyn said in the darkness. Cassian’s eyes glinted in the small shaft of light of the torch beside him.

“I haven’t always been in Intelligence,” Cassian said. Jyn thought that was all he would say, but after a few moments of silence he spoke again. “Before General Draven recruited me, I...well, I was like you. I was picked up by a Separatist group as a child.”

Jyn blinked. She was drawn back to Eadu, to Cassian dripping wet and furious. _I’ve been in this fight since I was six years old_ , he’d said. Jyn thought back to her early years with Saw, and it was difficult to remember when she’d learned what. Some things felt like she’d been born knowing them - how to shoot a blaster, how to wield her truncheons, the instinct to always know her exits, to never eat or drink anything given to her by a stranger. Seeing Cassian like _her_ , like a Partisan, was...difficult. She knew he had done things, terrible things, he’d said. Likely things she’d done, too, as Tanith, but for some reason, Jyn had always pictured it as a choice he’d made, as something he’d stepped into of his own volition.

Before she could think of anything to say, Kaytoo returned carrying two lengths of thin sheet metal. He handed them to Cassian, who bound them on either side of Jyn’s ankle with a length of bandage. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing, but it immobilized her foot enough for them to move her from the cold floor to the sleeping cabin and the ship’s only cot.

As Jyn was slowly coming down from the adrenaline surge that had kept her together and alert, the ship’s emergency lights blinked on, low and vaguely pink. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, she felt a wave of sickly exhaustion wash over her. Jyn wiped feebly at her grimy face, gritty with dried sweat and tears and caked with layers of ash and soot that she’d had yet to remove from Scarif.

As if he could read her mind, or more likely that he could simply see the discomfort plain on her dirty face, Cassian returned to the cot with a pair of towels.

“I figured this was easier than trying to get you into that tiny refresher,” he said, sitting down on the cot near her hip. Jyn took one of the towels - blessedly damp and warm and smelling of soap.

“This matchbox of a ship was clearly built for solo missions,” Jyn said with a glance around the small space. “What Katyoo could possibly have been thinking…”

“I can hear you,” came Kaytoo’s voice, indignant, and Jyn let herself grin. Next to her Cassian’s eyes had grown dark and his brow furrowed. When he glanced up and saw her looking, though, his forehead smoothed and his expression shifted to neutral. It was his spy face, Jyn thought, his hiding face.

“You were right,” Cassian said, avoiding her eyes and fiddling with a stray thread on the cot’s blanket. “What you said earlier. We need to do recon. What little supplies we have will be diminished within a few days, and we need medical supplies.”

“Do we even know where we are?”

“Kaytoo has very limited data on the Unknown Regions, but our coordinates put us in the Giaca system.”

“Giaca...” Jyn said, the syllables clunky and oddly harsh on her tongue. She had never heard of it, but at the moment she felt nothing but a visceral hatred of the place that she had yet to see in the light of day.

“It’s just about dawn,” Cassian said, rising to stand beside the cot. “If I leave soon, I should be back by nightfall. Give or take, until we can assess the length of days here.”

Jyn went cold and she could barely hear Cassian over the sudden ringing in her ears. “You can’t go alone,” she blurted over whatever he was saying. “We have no idea what’s out there.”

Cassian began shaking his head immediately. “I need Kay here to get the ship’s systems up and running.”

“There’s a hole torn clear through the hull, Cassian - we’re not flying anywhere in this thing!”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t communicate! Get a message back to Yavin - let them know we’re alive!”

“I can go with you - I just need a crutch, or --”

“Jyn,” Cassian said, looking at her closely with a softness that made her pause, that held her anger back from boiling over. “You don’t have to do everything on your own.”

“It wouldn’t be on my own,” she insisted, but it sounded weak to her own ears. “I’d be with you.”

Cassian raised a hand to his brow, pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. Jyn had only ever seen him do that when Kaytoo was being particularly stubborn and her ire peaked again at the comparison. “You can’t walk, Jyn - you _shouldn’t_ walk. Not if you want that ankle to heal properly.”

Jyn slumped back against her pillow. She knew he was right. Walking with her ankle so damaged, even if it were in a proper cast with regular bacta injections and bone stabilizers, was just asking for trouble. But the thought of Cassian walking into that forest without her sent a frisson of panic tearing up her throat. She took a deep breath against it and closed her eyes against Cassian’s concerned and stubborn gaze. She told herself that this time would be different. Cassian was not Saw, he was _not_ a Partisan, who’d have dropped her at the first sign of trouble. Though she didn’t understand why he _wasn’t_ dropping her. Cassian was a practical, sensible man. Their brief intimacy aside, he was not one to expose himself to vulnerability. Jyn had seen that the moment she met him, when he was all sideways glances and guarded eyes in the Alliance sit room on Yavin IV. For some reason, though, he had stayed for her - had _come back_ for her, over and over. Now would be his chance to go. If all the other times had posed too difficult or dangerous to ditch her, now was the time. Jyn was injured and unarmed - she couldn’t stop him.

“Okay,” she said. Cassian looked up sharply, as if startled by her acquiescence.

“What?” he asked slowly, eyes fixed on hers.

“Fine,” she said, going for nonchalance, but knowing it wouldn’t work on him, not anymore. “You’re right. I’m no use to you out there. I’d just slow you down.”

“Jyn,” he sighed. “This is for _your_ protection, not mine. I couldn’t --” He stopped, took a breath and turned on his heel, leaving the cabin. He returned a moment later with a small pack he’d scrounged from somewhere. He was tucking a blaster into his belt, along with his large utility vibroblade that he’d used to cut away the leg of her trousers. He reached into the pack and pulled out another blaster, equally battered, but a newer model than the one he carried, along with another blade from his boot. “I’ll be back tonight. If I’m not, I’ve told Kay to wait until morning before coming to look for me.”

Jyn was barely listening. All she could do was stare at the blaster and the knife, her own words to Saw echoing in her ears. _The last time I saw you, you gave me a knife and a loaded blaster and told me to wait in a bunker until daylight. You left me behind. You dumped me!_ She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, staring at the weapons in her hands, but when she finally looked up, Cassian was gone, and she began steeling herself for what was to come.

In the dim emergency lights of the cabin, Jyn couldn’t help but let her mind return to her cave on Lah’mu, her bunker hidden away from the world. She’d thought she could abandon it for good after Rogue One’s mission. She wasn’t meant to have survived Scarif, she was sure, if it mean finding herself back there, seven years old all over again - frightened, an unwanted liability. _Ditched - again._

* * *

As he packed a satchel with meager supplies, Cassian kept an ear on Kay, whose silence suddenly felt deafening now that Jyn was safe, if sulking.

“I need you to listen to Jyn while I’m gone, Kay,” he told him. “Don’t let her do anything stupid or hurt herself, but you have to trust her.”

As he spoke, Cassian casually walked over to stand by Kaytoo where the droid was examining some exposed wires pulled from their communications array.

“Those directives are contradictory,” Kaytoo said flatly, turning toward Cassian. He had let his guard down before, when Kay had been patching him up, but now Cassian was paying attention, and he took a closer look at the droid’s chassis. He knew Kaytoo inside and out, quite literally. The black plating on his chest was scarred and marred with blaster fire and the wear and tear of battle. But there were a few subtle differences to this KX unit from the one he’d salvaged on a raid of an Imperial facility eight years ago. The recessed light, which he had noticed earlier, had sent a spike of unease down Cassian’s spine that he’d driven away at the time. Now, though, he also noticed some subtle beveling at the plate seams which he was sure Kaytoo had never had. He was still clearly Kaytoo, no one could fake that unique personality - Cassian had made sure of that a long time ago - but somewhere between the firefight in the Citadel and their escape from Scarif, Kaytoo had given himself an upgrade and Cassian wanted to know how.

“What happened on Scarif, Kay?” he asked. The droid looked at Cassian and something behind his eyes whirred.

“You’ll have to be more specific, as many things happened there within the last 48 hours, much of which you are already aware. Unless you suffered a head injury that my scans did not find?”

Cassian sighed. Kaytoo’s excessive chatter always ramped up when he wanted to avoid a conversation. “No, Kay,” he said pointedly. “What happened to _you_ on Scarif?”

“Well, I aided you and Jyn Erso in an infiltration of the Citadel Tower and its data banks. I combed the data banks for the Death Star plans, codenamed project _Stardust_.”

“Kay!” Cassian snapped, and his voice turned desperate. “I know you have a new chassis - how did you find a new body? How did you find this ship?”

Kaytoo was silent for a long moment. “It is an interesting story, it’s true,” the droid said slowly. “But the sun has risen and based on Giaca’s rotation around its star, I estimate that you have roughly 11 hours of daylight available. Given our location it may take some time for you to reach what passes for civilization on this planet.”

Cassian cursed and turned away from Kaytoo, his frustration and fondness warring against each other, in a way that only Kaytoo managed. His curiosity to understand how they’d survived would continue to gnaw at him, but more pressing was understanding how they would _continue_ to survive.

With that in mind, Cassian hitched his pack over his shoulder, felt the comfort of his blaster at his hip, and opened the emergency hatch door out into the forest.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's commented and left kudos! You keep me writing :) As a side note, I read _Rebel Rising_ this week, so I’m incorporating a few of the bits and pieces that I liked into this story. I haven't decided how closely I'll follow that story as "canon," as there are some glaring contradictions between _Rebel Rising_ and the _Rogue One_ novelization.

As Cassian set out into the pale morning light, he took in his surroundings. It had been a long time since he’d been on such an isolated planet. Before the Alliance had settled at Massassi, Yavin IV had been largely uninhabited - long since abandoned and left to rot in the jungle heat. Giaca was mercifully temperate, but something about this place still reminded him of Base One. The forest they’d crashed in was old. The trees were tall and strong and weathered, and the hush that seemed to descend on the place felt almost holy. Cassian had never been a religious man, had little faith in the Force, but he recognized the power of such places. The Massassi temple, Jedha City - he’d felt _something_ in those holy places that gave him pause, it was true. In Jedha it had been easy to assume it was the weight of so many unknown eyes on him, the high tensions of their mission, but in the years that Cassian had called the Massassi outpost home, it had carried a similar weight.

Now, making his way through the forests of Giaca, Cassian didn’t feel watched, per se, but he felt _known_ \- exposed. To what, though, he couldn’t say. As he walked, the feeling prickle at his shoulder blades. The trees seemed to extend so high that he couldn’t see where they ended, could barely see the sky above them, and was cast in shadow for much of his walk. At his feet, the roots twined their way around rocks and lichen, practically braiding amongst each other; where one’s roots ended and another’s began was nearly impossible to discern.

When Cassian finally found the wood’s edge, he couldn’t have said how far he’d walked or for how long. A jolt of panic shot down his spine as he realized that he wasn’t sure which direction the shuttle was, what direction he’d come from. Something about the forest had let his guard down, had made him feel irrationally safe in a way he had never felt before. As he turned back to retrace his steps, a shiver ran through the trees, rustling the leaves overhead and catching at his hair. As he looked around, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up and his pulse spiked. Another gust of wind brought with it a voice in his ear.

 _Captain_?

Cassian pulled his blaster from his holster in a swift, practiced movement, flipping off the safety as he spun around, eyes flicking in all directions in search of the source of the voice. The breeze died down and with it, the presence he’d felt vanished, leaving Cassian breathing hard, every muscle tensed. His nerves were just starting to settle as he turned back around, when there was a sudden pressure at his back that sent him stumbling forward, tripping over snarled roots and over an embankment. As he fell, his hands hit damp soil and when he looked up the trees had thinned out and he could see the sky.

Cassian scrambled to his feet again, brushing dirt from his knees, and turned back to gaze up at where he’d lost his footing. The forest rose up over him like a monument, shrouded in shadow and practically trembling with... _something_ , something that Cassian could not name. Perhaps it was the presence he’d felt - the _voice_ he’d heard. But that wasn’t possible. _It’s the stress catching up with you_ , he thought, rubbing at his tired eyes. Because it _wasn’t_ possible, the voice he’d heard. _That_ voice could not possibly be on Giaca, Cassian told himself.

No matter what he wanted to be true, he knew that Chirrut Imwe was not speaking to him on Giaca. In all likelihood, he was nothing anymore, nothing but dust in the cold vacuum of space.  

* * *

Jyn slept fitfully in the shuttle’s tiny cabin. Each time she woke it was to sickly emerald green light behind her eyelids and the smell of the humid, salty air of Scarif’s beaches. The dreams were nothing but blurred images, smudged faces that she ached to see clearly - her father and mother collided with the chaos of the battle on Scarif. Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze sat in her childhood home on Lah’mu. Saw screamed at her to run as she climbed the databank inside the Citadel tower. Everything mixed together until it left Jyn shaking and sweating. The last time she’d woken, it was to the voice of Chirrut in her head, saying _I am one with the force, and the force is with me._ If it hadn’t felt so real, it would have calmed Jyn. Instead it drove her out of sleep completely, leaving her with nothing to do but stare at the ceiling.  

Since she couldn’t go back to sleep, she decided to annoy Kaytoo until he agreed to help her out of the bunk and back out into the cargo bay to the open emergency hatch and some fresh air.

“This would be much easier if you’d just let me carry you,” Kaytoo grumbled as he slowly moved alongside Jyn, careful not to jostle her splinted ankle.

“Over my dead body,” Jyn snapped from his side, one arm slung around his chassis.

“Your death would be of little direct consequence to me. In fact, it would most likely improve my odds of survival on Giaca, along with Cassian’s.”

Jyn ignored him in favor of lowering herself to the floor of the cargo bay at the edge of the open door. She carefully laid her right leg out in front of her and let her left dangle out the door to rustle some leaves on the forest floor. The crystal at her breastbone was strangely warm against her skin, and she pulled it out to hold between her fingers.

Though the sun had risen hours ago now, its light was weak and cast the forest in shadow. And while Jyn couldn’t name a single species on Giaca, she was surprised by the quiet - barely a ripple of wind made its way through the trees.

The silence and stillness, combined with her forced inaction, made Jyn restless, made her shoulders bunch and tense. Her instinct was to run, to assess her surroundings, to do anything but sit idly by and wait for Cassian to return. It was _maddening._

Instead, she examined the weapons Cassian had given her. The memory of Saw abandoning her all those years ago was bitter at the back of her throat, but she swallowed it down. She had waited until daylight for Saw, waited amid the burning remains of Tamsye Prime, and then she had waited some more. She could wait for Cassian until dusk. This was different, she told herself, looking out into the trees. There was no sign of danger, no sign of the Empire. There was no threat that she could see. _Maybe that’s worse,_ she thought, but pushed the notion down. In the short time they’d known each other, Cassian had come back for her three times and that was three more than anyone else. She refused to let herself hope, but she let that small glimmer push back the darkness of her cave swelling up to pull her down.

The blaster Cassian had left her with was newer than the one she’d taken from Yavin, and she idly wondered what had happened to that one. She didn’t remember dropping it, but by the time they’d reached the beach on Scarif, most coherent thought had left her. She put the new blaster down by her hip, in easy reach, and felt the handle of the folded vibroblade where it sat in her pocket. The blade Saw had left with her on Tamsye Prime had been much larger, one of a pair that he’d carried on their missions. She hadn’t used it much - preferring the blunt force of her truncheons - and had traded it for credits on Five Points not long after she’d assumed the alias of Tanith Ponta.

“Why don’t you just leave me then?” Jyn asked Kaytoo eventually, not even sure if the droid could hear her from where she sat. Kaytoo swiveled his head from where he stood behind the cockpit, once more elbow deep in the wires of the ship’s communications array. “If it would be easier, why not just go?”

“I was ordered not to,” he said simply, returning to his work.

“Cassian told you to babysit me?” Jyn couldn’t help the spike of anger at the thought that he was having her watched by a droid. After all they’d been through, it left her feeling strangely empty.

“My directives are to listen to you, to protect you, and to trust you,” Kaytoo said, as if reading back Cassian’s orders from wherever they were stored in his memory bank. “I am unable to follow those orders if I am not in your presence. ”

Jyn blinked and thought of Cassian ordering Kaytoo to trust her. The small glimmer in her chest glowed brighter - warmed her, even - pushing the darkness of her cave to the back of her mind where she preferred it.

* * *

Tension slowly leached from Cassian’s shoulders the further he hiked from the forest. A brisk wind had picked up as he crossed the grasslands that led away from the trees, and it cleared his head enough to make him sure the voice he’d heard had been a figment of his exhausted imagination. Out of all of the Rogue One team, Chirrut had cut through Cassian’s defenses the quickest. _There’s more than one sort of prison, Captain,_ he’d said. _I sense that you carry yours wherever you go._ He had somehow been able to discern the shapes of Cassian’s deepest secrets on a whim, without even the benefit of sight to aid him. Though Cassian was sure that, visual blindness aside, the Guardian had many ways of seeing the world that the rest of them sorely lacked.

A strong gust of wind snagged at Cassian’s shirt and the bacta patch beneath it. He raised a hand to his side, feeling the thin healing skin beneath. In the light of day, all the aches in his bruised muscles were coming roaring back. Some miracle had saved him from breaking his back when he’d fallen from the citadel’s data tower, but he couldn’t be sure of the damage without a full medical screen - something they’d be hard pressed to find any time soon. Kaytoo’s scans had determined no internal bleeding, though Cassian had sustained enough injuries throughout his life to know it would catch up with him sooner than later. For now, the pain was tolerable, so Cassian pushed it aside.

On the wind, too, came the scent of spice and the musk of an animal, and with it there were voices. Cassian’s pulse spiked and he quickened his pace westward toward an outcropping of brush and the sound of running water, away from the voices. As he neared the bank of a stream, he ducked low into the thick bushes, out of sight, just in time to see a caravan cresting a hill from the east.

The first thing Cassian noticed was the creature - massive, hairy, and muscular, its long snout encased in a rough metal muzzle. Its four large clawed feet dug into the grasslands like a tiller, tossing earth with each step. Atop it were two humans - male by the sound of their voices - and a large pack secured to a makeshift saddle behind them. The one at the front of the beast wore a leather jacket, while the other a red hooded cloak. The cloaked man held a long staff in one hand and a blaster in the other, while two more men flanked the beast on foot, each with pointed staffs in hand and sniper rifles on their backs.

The one at the front held reins to the beast’s muzzle firmly in both hands, and Cassian could see a faded insignia on the arm of his jacket - a small circle surrounded by a spiked ring. Cassian knew the symbol of the Black Sun well - to many it was as recognizable as the Empire, and equally despicable. From where he hid, Cassian took in the man’s dirty appearance, his unkempt red beard and worn clothing. His men looked equally disheveled and in need of a few good meals. They didn’t look like they had access to Black Sun resources, or if they had those days were long gone. Cassian tucked those observations into the back of his mind, as they drew nearer and he could hear their conversation.

The man at the back of the creature was speaking, his Basic accented so thick Cassian could barely understand the words. “The plan was to always meet at the new moon - for best cover.”

“The last time we tried that, the contact almost crashed their hopper into one of the columns,” said another, on the ground. He had an anxious, ratty face and looked barely older than eighteen.

“Everyone takes that risk landing at Glasspoint,” came the gruff voice of the man Cassian assumed to be the leader, the one controlling the beast. “It’s that or risk ambush.”

The men on the ground murmured assent and they trotted along to keep up with the beast, which rolled its head from side to side, emitting an irritated rumble. The hooded man prodded it in the flank with his staff, which Cassian now realized was actually a stun prod. The beast howled so loud Cassian felt it in his bones. He held his blaster tighter.

“Oy!” cried the ratty faced one. “This Brintak will shred us if you keep that up!”

“I dunno why we even took this thing,” said the hooded one sullenly, though he moved his prod away from the Brintak’s body.

“It was that or walk the entire way,” said the leader, indifferent to their grousing. “You want off?”

“Coulda picked one that smelled better, is all…”

As the group continued to move westward through the grass, their voices faded. Cassian stayed in the brush until they were a safe distance away before continuing along behind them. The last thing he, Jyn, and Kaytoo needed was to get tangled up with the galaxy’s biggest crime syndicate with no credits or means of protecting themselves. Cassian crossed to the other side of the stream, kept close to the bank, and let the sound of the rushing water mask his footsteps.

Being on an unknown planet in an unknown system left Cassian feeling out of sorts and amateurish. His internal clock was off, and he couldn’t tell how long he’d been gone. He felt disoriented in a way he hadn’t felt in years. He thought it was mid-afternoon - the sun had peaked over an hour ago - but he couldn’t be sure.

Cassian’s work had led him to entanglements with various criminal sects - from offshoot rebel groups like Saw Guerrera’s partisans to lone bounty hunters and mercenaries. He didn’t have enough intelligence on these men or the planet to build a convincing alias, and showing any sort of vulnerability would get him killed or captured. His strength had always been in his ability to camouflage himself, hiding in plain sight among the masses - masses which didn’t exist here. With an unfamiliar twinge in his gut, Cassian wished that Jyn were there. After hours spent with her file, he knew that she would know how to work with these types. She knew what they wanted and how to get them to trust her.  

As he stopped at a bend in the stream, he wondered how she was doing. He hated to leave Jyn, knew that idleness didn’t suit her, and he hoped that she and Kay managed to avoid killing each other. He had crouched down to drink from the stream when a flash of light caught his eye. Not light, he realized, but _metal_ \- reflecting the sun back into his eyes. He took a moment to note how far his marks had moved before turning back to the gleam of aluminum siding. It was half-buried in the brush and muddy banks of the water, but Cassian recognized it nonetheless - a landspeeder.

* * *

Jyn had spent her day alternating between fitful napping and doing everything she could to annoy Kaytoo. After hours of working to get their comm system back up and running with no success, Jyn convinced the droid to search the surrounding forest to find her a pair of sturdy, straight branches. She avoided telling him what they were for, but when he returned after an hour - never straying out of hearing range while he grumbled the entire time - he watched her closely as she assessed them.

“Cassian will not be please with you, Jyn Erso,” he said plainly as she held them up for inspection. He’d even managed to find several with y-shaped forked branches.

“What else is new?” she sighed.

“He’ll not be pleased with me, either.”

“He’ll be pleased just fine if I can get around. I’m no good to anyone if I can’t move.”

“This would have all gone smoother if you’d simply let me assist you.”

“You just love the idea of tossing my over your shoulder like a sack of grain, eh?”

“It would satisfy Cassian’s directives much more efficiently than this plan.”

“Nice try, but it’s not going to happen.”

Jyn spent the later afternoon peeling bark from the limbs Kaytoo had brought her, braiding it into a workable twine. It was a skill she’d picked up in her early days with Saw - there had been only so much a child still too small to shoot a blaster could do when she wasn’t strength training, and she’d learned to braid all sorts of fibers found on Wrea to be used as makeshift straps and ties. That hadn’t lasted long before Saw had begun her training on a pair of truncheons, which she’d taken to instantly.  

The sun was beginning to set when Jyn had a pair of workable crutches. She stood, legs a bit shaky from disuse all day, and tested them out. The painkiller Cassian had given her before he’d left was starting to wear off and Jyn could feel her ankle beginning to throb in its splint. She was grateful she’d managed to hold onto her gloves, which would at least help with chafing against the rough wood until she could smooth it out completely. With the help of her twine and Cassian’s vibroblade, she’d created some handles - and when she stood, tentatively putting all her weight against the wood, they held. Jyn felt a small swell of pride that she’d managed to do something right.

Once the sun had gone down, Jyn’s anxiety began to spike at Cassian’s absence and she felt like climbing the walls. Not only was she bored out of her skull, but she just wasn’t used to the inaction and solitude. During her months at Wobani, she’d spent long days toiling at one work site or another, followed by the heavy sleep brought on by so much exhaustion. There was never a moment to herself, even in her cell - shared by various cellmates. Her last one, Kennel, had not been much of a conversationalist, and rarely spoke Basic except for the occasional vague threats to Jyn’s life she’d never followed through on. Jyn managed a small grin, thinking Kennel reminded her of a grumpy, vaguely homicidal droid she knew.

Kaytoo didn’t seem to know how to handle Cassian’s directives - to listen to Jyn, to protect her, to trust her. He was the least comforting presence Jyn thought she’d ever felt, but he had spent much of the day alternating between repair attempts and hovering at Jyn’s side like a seven foot mother hen. At the moment, he was back in the ship’s communications array, ciphering through a tangle of wires, methodically testing each one for...something that Jyn didn’t know a damn thing about.

She stood with the help of one of her crutches and paced the length of the small cargo bay.

“Just because you are mobile, doesn’t mean you should move aimlessly,” Kaytoo said without looking up from his work. “It increases the probability that you will damage your ankle again.”

“I’m practicing,” Jyn muttered. It was partly true - the burn in her arms as she moved her weight was a welcome distraction. Paying attention to her body pulled her mind away from thoughts of Cassian. He’d said he would return by nightfall and that had been hours ago. He could be injured, or captured, or lost, or _worse_ . Jyn could barely think the word _dead_ \- not about Cassian, not now, after they’d so narrowly escaped Scarif alive.

It had never been a problem for her before, thinking of death. She’d spent most of her time on Wobani thinking she’d be dead within a year. She’d spent her whole life before that fighting with every fiber of her being to simply _survive_ . Death was not something she’d feared. But now, after facing her death and _surviving_ \- surviving when so many had died, so many whose faces were burned into Jyn’s memory - she wasn’t about to give up again so easily.

“How did you do it?” Jyn asked Kaytoo suddenly. The question had been shoved to the back of her mind for the last 24 hours, but it wasn’t something she could avoid anymore.

Kaytoo stilled amidst his tangle of wires. The light behind his eyes flickered, almost as if he were hesitating. “How did I do what?” he asked, unconvincing in his ignorance. K-2SO was many things, but he was not ignorant.

“You’re the galaxy’s worst liar, Kay,” she said. “Just tell me.”

“If your implied query is in regard to our escape from Scarif, then it was really quite simple.”

Jyn huffed a dark chuckle. “Nothing about that mission was simple.” As the words left her mouth, the laugh died in her throat. If there had been a chance for simplicity, they wouldn’t have lost so many.  Jyn levered herself across the cargo bay and sat back down in the cockpit, suddenly weary.

Kaytoo seemed to sense her unease. He put down the wires he’d been cataloguing and turned toward her. “When I locked you and Cassian in the data vault, I downloaded a backup of my hard drive to the droid data archive in the Citadel tower. At that point, the likelihood of my termination was at 95%, so I thought it wise to find an alternative means of survival. I was able to identify all of the KX units within the tower’s maintenance division. Before my previous body was destroyed by stormtroopers, I uploaded my backup drive into a new unit.”

Jyn blinked. When he said it like that, well, it _did_ sound somewhat simple - for a droid, at least.

“Once I oriented myself to my new location in the maintenance hall, I was no longer able to locate you or Cassian on the security feed. However, there was significant attention being paid to the top of the tower, and I could only assume you had made it that far.”

“That’s a pretty big assumption,” Jyn interrupted. “How’d you know we weren’t dead at the bottom of that data bank?” Her stomach flopped over as she remembered the sight of Cassian falling, her throat raw from crying out his name. It had echoed in her ears as she’d held onto the tower as hard as she could.

“The fight was still raging on. Every last trooper in the Imperial garrison had been deployed. If they had captured you, the news would have spread across the base - security would have been made aware of new prisoners. We heard no such thing, so I could only assume you were still fighting. I left the maintenance hall and made my way to one of the compound’s transport shuttle hangars at the base of the tower, where I found an unattended transport.”

“In a whole hangar of shuttles, this rusty matchbox was the best you could do?” Jyn griped at Kaytoo in an attempt to calm her heart hammering in her chest. Despite Kaytoo’s clinical description of his survival and their rescue, hearing how everything had played out from someone else’s perspective made her queasy, especially as she knew how it ended.

“It was unobtrusive and less likely to get shot out of the sky than a starfighter,” Kaytoo said, his vocabulator radiating irritation.

Jyn took a breath. Flashes of memory were coming back to her now that Kaytoo was filling in the holes. The wind on the beach had whipped hard at her hair and she’d wrapped her arms tight around Cassian’s neck, face buried into his shoulder as he held on to her, eyes closed against the wave of destruction heading their way.

She’d been jarred from the blank state she’d let her mind go to as she’d willed herself to accept their fate. She’d been almost in a place of peace when Cassian had jerked against her and Kaytoo had literally hauled them into the transport’s cargo hatch.

“You found us on the beach,” she whispered, clutching at her necklace involuntarily and blinking away the vision of green light that had all but enshrouded them.

Kaytoo was silent for a long time and they sat there together, neither moving.

“My chances of successfully retrieving Cassian were at .095%,” he eventually said, vocabulator laced with a regret she had never heard in a droid, least of all this one. “I could not find the others.”

Jyn felt a trail of heat run down her cheek and realized she was crying. “Thank you,” she croaked out, and she knew it wasn’t enough, but she had no other words.

With Kaytoo’s story out in the open, a shared quiet descended between them. Jyn, who’d desperately wanted to know how they’d survived, now wanted nothing more than to forget everything she’d learned, if only it would take with it the dredged up faces of their friends. And with their faces came Cassian’s once more. He was three hours late, and Jyn’s stomach tied itself into knots. She couldn’t bear to add his face to her mental list of those lost - not now, after everything they’d accomplished, and for what? Had the plans even gotten back to Yavin? Had the Alliance stopped squabbling amongst themselves long enough to face the Death Star? Had all of her father’s work been in vain?

Amid all the questions tumbling through her mind, Cassian still stayed at the front of her thoughts - the only one who she could still help, the only one still in reach. Just the thought of losing Cassian now sent Jyn skittering back into her mind’s cave, where she was seven years old, alone and confused, and again at sixteen, abandoned in an artillery bunker with no idea what her future held. If she thought about what came next _without_ Cassian she was left with nothing but what had come _before_ \- Liana Hallik’s miserable existence of endless nights bent over a code replicator, hastily pulling together forgeries for reckless deals with smugglers, living credit to credit, job to job, with no one and nothing to tie her down. Before a couple of weeks ago, she’d have done anything to get out of Wobani and _back_ to that life. Now it just felt hollow and aimless. _Lonely_ , she thought, bitterly. She’d been so short on friends for so long, Jyn had become used to the solitude - it was safer than the alternative. But now, Jyn couldn’t bear the thought of losing the only friend she had.

As she sat looking out the viewport, Jyn gripped her necklace again, a single stable point in the chaos of her thoughts. Kaytoo had managed to unearth the nose of the ship as well as he could on his own, so Jyn could see into the darkness of the forest and any sign of Cassian’s return. She noticed, not for the first time that day, that her kyber crystal was warm against her skin. She held it up to the dim light leaking into the cockpit from the cargo bay, glinting dully as it always had. It had heated and cooled throughout the day, at seemingly random intervals, leaving Jyn with a prickle at her shoulder blades. Now the crystal was heating again and she felt a shift of air in the cabin. Jyn turned to where Kaytoo was sitting now in low-power mode - the rest of the cabin was silent and still, but Jyn felt _something_.

Suddenly, there was a voice directly in her ear. _Where are you, Jyn Erso?_

Jyn spun in the chair, pulling her blaster from her hip, finger on the trigger. But there was no one there in the cramped cockpit, and nowhere for them to have gone. Her heart hammered in her chest and she breathed quickly in short bursts through her nose, blinking hard, trying to make sense of the voice - _that_ voice, in particular. That had been _Chirrut’s_ voice, Jyn was positive of that. Kaytoo’s story had seriously compromised her if she was hearing voices of the dead. 

As she tried to gather her bearings, Jyn noticed a light approaching quickly in the darkness outside. She scrambled for her crutches, tucking the gun into her waistband.

“Kaytoo,” she hissed, swinging herself across the cargo bay. “We’ve got company.”

Kaytoo’s servos whirred quietly and his eyes flickered back to life. “Cassian?”

“Not unless he’s found transport.” Jyn stood in the emergency doorway, back far enough from the edge to keep herself cast in shadow, not visible to whoever was approaching. She leaned her right shoulder against the doorway, crutch tucked under her armpit, and leveled her blaster at the approaching headlamps.

It was a landspeeder, she could now see. Even in the darkness she could tell that it had seen better days.

“Identify yourself,” Jyn yelled, and she ignored the harsh quality of her voice that she’d reserved for her time as Tanith, days spent on space stations and gruelingly long system hoppers with various unsavory smugglers and their questionable cargo. The driver of the speeder was still cast in shadow, and she couldn’t make out a face. “I will not hesitate to shoot you!” Out of the darkness, Jyn saw two arms raise as a man hopped out of the speeder.

“Captain Cassian Jeron Andor, Alliance Intelligence,” said the voice, laced with a thin hint of amusement. Jyn’s shoulders sagged as Cassian stepped forward into the speeder’s lights - there was a small grin on his face that Jyn had never seen before. The relief that swept through her was immense. She dropped her arms and almost dropped the blaster in her haste to scramble out of the ship.

Cassian was at her side before she could do more than reach for her crutches. “You’ve been busy,” he said, eyeing them, but his voice was warm rather than scolding, like Jyn had half-expected.

“You came back,” she blurted out before she could stop herself.    

“I told you I was coming back,” he said, looking down at her with an impatient frown. That’s more familiar, Jyn thought. She’d seen that expression on his face countless times in the short time they’d known each other. Something about that look, the harshness of his features cast in the shadows outside the ship, put her more at ease than the grin he’d greeted her with. It put her guard down enough for her to continue.

“No one has ever come back for me,” she said softly, eyes cast downward, landing on an old bloodstain on his collar. “And you’ve come back three times.”

“Yes,” Cassian said slowly, voice matter-of-fact. “I’ve come back three times.”

The glimmer of warmth in her chest that Jyn had felt throughout the day grew, and she felt an ache lodge behind her sternum that had nothing to do with her battered body.

Cassian reached out a hand to tuck a stray piece of hair behind Jyn’s ear, but when he pulled it away, Jyn noticed his hand was shaking.

“What’s wrong?” she asked sharply, taking his fingers in her hand.

“It’s nothing,” Cassian said, pulling away and slowly climbing up into the shuttle. He reached down to help Jyn up, and as he steadied her, Jyn could hear his breath coming in ragged gasps against her ear. He leaned his weight against her shoulder, and Jyn had to steady them both with a hand to the wall of the shuttle. Her pulse spiked as she was reminded of their descent from the top of the Citadel tower.

“Cassian,” she said. “What happened?” When he didn’t say anything she turned to look him in the eye, but his eyes were closed and he was leaning more of his weight on her. She wrapped her arms around his ribs, which elicited a low groan from Cassian. He was too heavy for her to hold up for long, and when she tested putting any weight on her ankle, she saw stars, and immediately lifted it.

“Kay, I need help!” she yelled, a shot of ice piercing her chest, freezing out all traces of warmth she’d felt moments before, as Cassian slumped against her and they both sunk to the floor.


	4. Chapter 4

Between Kaytoo and Jyn, the two of them forced Cassian to rest after he couldn’t stop the tremors in his hands, and could barely stand up straight for more than a few minutes at a time without his vision going blurry. Jyn sat at the side of the cot and watched Cassian drink down a canteen full of tepid, stale water - all they had left in their small reserve.

“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” he told her, and even to his own ears it sounded petulant. In Cassian’s defense, he was exhausted and dehydrated, and now that he had been sitting still for a while, the pain was coming back to the forefront of his mind with every breath he took.

Beside him, Jyn was tearing up their blanket into long strips. “If that were true for either of us, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” she said sharply, words puncturing every forceful tear.

Cassian sighed and let her work, for fear of gaining more injuries at her hand. “I found us a speeder. I’d say that was worth it.”

“Not if you’re going to fall over before we can use it!”

Cassian leaned forward, putting the canteen down between them, ignoring his protesting ribs. He could see that Jyn’s hands were shaking, too. Her every move exuded agitation.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out to still her hands. “Your injury was worse than mine. I prioritized.”

“You hid yours. There’s a difference.”

When he’d awoken after the escape from Scarif, he’d known he’d bruised his ribs in the fall, but it wasn’t until they’d crashed on Giaca that they’d begun to cause him noticeable pain. He was used to working through pain, though. It was a necessary part of life - deal with it for now or risk getting caught. Of course, Cassian was not foolish enough to think his wounds would heal themselves if he didn’t take proper care of them, but he knew what his body could take, how far he could push it before he had to stop.

“Give me those,” he snapped, reaching for the strips of blanket.

“No,” she growled, pulling away. “Just let me help you, okay? You told Kaytoo to trust me - the least you could do is follow your own order.”

“Wrapping my ribs is not going to help.”

“It’ll help with the pain until we can figure something else out,” she snapped. “Our medkit is empty and you haven’t slept in days.”

“I’ll use them when we leave in the morning, then.”

“Fine.” Jyn dumped the strips in a heap at the foot of the cot. Cassian thought she was about to leave, to stomp out of the room as well as she could on crutches, but instead she took a deep breath and turned back to him. “Take off your shirt.”

Cassian swallowed. If Jyn didn’t sound like she would break his ribs for real if he didn’t comply, then he may have blushed at the words. That was ridiculous, though, and Cassian knew it. They’d seen each other naked, had been together at their most vulnerable, had trusted each other enough to let the other see them at their lowest.

Cassian unbuttoned his shirt without protest.

“I do trust you,” he said quietly. Jyn didn’t say anything, but moved closer to him as he shrugged out of the shirt. She didn’t try to wrap his ribs - it would only make things worse while he slept and she knew it - but she did reach a hand out to the bacta patch on his side.  She gently pulled it away, the adhesive already fading enough to make it fall off with ease. The patch was dry and the wound was thankfully almost completely healed. “The number of people I would trust with my life I can count on one hand, and one of them is you.”

Jyn’s hands stilled on his skin. “Is one of them a droid?”

“ _ Jyn _ ,” he said, frustrated, and he couldn’t stop himself from reaching out to graze a finger against her cheek, to tuck a loose lock of hair behind her ear. She looked up at the contact, eyes guarded. “You asked me why I came back for you.”

“I never  _ asked  _ \--”

“You didn’t  _ have _ to,” Cassian interrupted her, and he would be damned if she stopped him from saying what he had to say. “I came back for you because there is no one I trust more to have my back.”

The words hung between them. Jyn looked up at him from under a deeply furrowed brow, and Cassian realized his hand was still lingering at her neck. He leaned forward and kissed her, closing the space between them. It was a chaste kiss, gentle but sure. Cassian didn’t like making promises, because so often they were not ones he could keep. But with this kiss, which she returned with an equally firm pressure of her own, he wanted her to understand: he would always come back for her.

* * *

Cassian left the cot with promises to Jyn to return shortly to sleep. His whole body ached and his head was growing fuzzy, but he had to speak to Kaytoo now or he’d never sleep. Cassian found him sitting in the cockpit, circuits flickering behind his eyes.

“You should be sleeping,” Kay said, not turning or making any other indication that he’d noticed Cassian’s approach.

“I can’t sleep yet,” Cassian told him, easing himself down into the co-pilot’s seat as gently as he could.

“Do you not like sleeping with Jyn Erso?”

Cassian willed the heat not to rise in his cheeks, but he was sure Kaytoo still saw it. He also knew that the droid was purposefully distracting him. Strategy and tactical analysis was the basis of his programming after all, and Cassian had not changed that when he’d removed Kaytoo’s Imperial protocols.

“Why are you avoiding this conversation, Kay?”

“We are having a conversation right now.”

Cassian rolled his eyes. “Would you be less evasive if I told you you were acting like Jyn right now?”

The silence that followed was palpable, and Cassian suppressed a grin. His humor began to fade, though, after a full minute of waiting for Kay to say anything. He was about to switch tactics when Kaytoo finally spoke.

“Do you not remember me pulling you from the beach?” he asked, voice free of his usual caustic sarcasm. “Jyn remembered.”

Cassian frowned. When he thought back to the events of not even 48 hours ago, he was met with a mental block - like a heavy black curtain - that he wasn’t ready to push aside yet. Even a feather light touch to it revealed a flash of light and an unearthly roar in his ears. It was accompanied by the feeling of Jyn in his arms and scent of sweat and blaster fire that stuck to her skin. But what he remembered most was one spot tucked beneath her hair, a warm earthy scent that he’d never smelled before, which he realized must be uniquely Jyn.

“Um,” he muttered, blinking away the fleeting memories. He’d wanted the story out of Kaytoo, but when faced with examining them, he was unable to process even the smallest breach of his defenses. “Not really.”

“The human mind is such a fragile thing. I’ll never understand how you’ve all survived so long as a species.”

Cassian huffed out a chuckle. He appreciated that Kay did not push him. Cassian was used to being forced to retrieve all manner of unpleasant memories. General Draven had always been able to pull everything out of Cassian, as was his right during a debrief. But there was something different about relaying events in a debrief that allowed him to disconnect from it all, to report the facts without the emotions attached. Debriefs were Cassian’s brand of therapy - once the facts were gone, the emotions were tucked away, nebulous and detached from their memories. It was the only way he could continue to function in his line of work.

These emotions, though, felt different from the ones usually attached to missions. He wasn’t sure if a debrief could have successfully stripped them from him as usual. Ever since the mission to Jedha, there’d been a shift in how he processed his actions. Before, it was like watching them on a holonovella, but now, he felt every action down to his bones.

He took a deep breath to still his churning thoughts, and it send a jolt through his ribcage that made him see stars in the dark cabin.

“That body,” he gritted out, holding a hand to his ribs as he nodded toward Kaytoo. “Where did you get it?”

Cassian couldn’t quite get himself to say anything about Kaytoo’s old body - the one he’d had for nine years, which Cassian had known for eight. Cassian knew every scratch, every dent of Kaytoo’s chassis. He struggled to look at this new one and not still feel an ache in his chest, a loss.

“I located it at the maintenance level of the Citadel Tower. This droid - K6LA - was plugged into the system for a diagnostics scan. I overrode and rewrote his hard drive with little trouble.”

As Cassian processed that information he was infinitely glad - not for the first time - that Kay was so resourceful, that whatever Cassian had managed to do in his reprogramming, had created within him such a fierce survival instinct. With only a small twinge of guilt, he was also grateful for the droid’s loyalty. Cassian knew that he  _ could  _ survive without Kaytoo at his back, but he’d been his steady companion - his only steady  _ friend  _ \- for so long that Cassian didn’t want to think about what that loss would feel like.

“I understand if you’re worried,” Kaytoo said. “Of residual imperial programming.”

“No,” Cassian told him instantly, shaking his head.

“Most beings struggle to accept the very low risk factor of Imperial protocols surviving a reprogram.”

“I know you, Kay,” Cassian said quietly. “And you know I don’t believe anything anyone has ever said about you.”

“Your loyalty has always been peculiar.”

“Would you rather I shot you?”

“Loyalty aside, with your injuries and Jyn’s, I’d say you need all the help you can get. Terminating me would not be wise if you plan to survive here.”

Cassian sighed. Kay was right - he and Jyn had managed to fuck everything up on their own - and that would be nothing but worse news if they didn’t manage to find another way off-planet, and soon.

“Is this interrogation over or do you have more questions before you let me get back to me catalog?” Kay asked.

“Catalog?”

“Of our surroundings. There are almost no Imperial or Republic era records of this planet. While you were out exploring today, I began collecting data.”

“No more questions,” Cassian told him, making a mental note to review Kay’s catalog of the planet they found themselves on. “I’m..glad...you did what you did. To survive.”

“In all the simulations I ran before the troopers damaged my chassis beyond repair, I found that those in which you did not survive were...disconcerting. As were those in which I survived but you did not. It was most unsatisfactory.”

Cassian closed his eyes tightly against the wave of emotion and memory that threatened to rush out - the sounds of Kaytoo being shot by the troopers, his last words, garbled over the damaged comm -  _ climb!  _ Cassian laid a hand to Kaytoo’s shoulder, clasped the cool metal and nodded at the droid before turning to leave.

“Cassian,” Kay said, and as Cassian turned his head, Kaytoo thrust a blanket into his hand. “I found this beneath the pilot’s seat today. Since Jyn Erso has destroyed your other blanket, I thought you would like it. To help you sleep.”

“Thanks, Kay.”

“I don’t recommend sharing it.”

“Goodnight, Kay.”

* * *

After Jyn finished examining Cassian’s ribs, he’d left the cot to speak with Kaytoo. He had not said what about, but even with minimal eavesdropping, Jyn was sure the droid was finally telling Cassian how he had rescued them. From where she was sitting on the cot, she could hear him speaking in a harsh low tone. Her chest tightened at the thought of reliving the events yet another time, so Jyn stayed where she was. She clutched at her necklace and found herself oddly disappointed when it was cool to the touch. She thought back to the presence she’d felt and the sound of Chirrut’s voice that still echoed in her ears as if he stood right beside her. Jyn’s faith in the force was limited to what bits and pieces she remembered from her mother’s teachings as a child, and that had never told her anything about hearing the voices of dead Guardians of the Whills.

She laid down on the cot, letting her ankle get the elevation it needed after moving around on it too long. She tried to remember all of Chirrut’s mantras about the force and everything that Lyra use to say. After a while, she drifted off to sleep, thoughts on kyber crystals and whispers in the trees.

She awoke with a start sometime later to the sound of fabric moving at her feet.

“Cassian?”

“Go back to sleep,” he said, and Jyn felt the weight of a rough blanket against her arm.

“Where did you find this?” she asked.

“Kay found it rolled up under the pilot’s chair.” he started to move away, but Jyn reached out for his wrist.

“You need to sleep,” she said.

“I know.”

“Stay.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

From where she lay in the dark, Jyn could hear the sounds of cloth rustling and a soft thud of what she assumed were Cassian’s boots hitting the floor. A moment later she felt the cot dip as he sat and with barely a sound lay down beside her in the small space. Only after he had settled did she hear him release a breath he’d been holding.

“Did you talk to Kay?” she asked after a few long moments of silence.

Cassian nodded next to her. “Yes,” he murmured.

Jyn wasn’t sure what to say -- she couldn’t tell how he might have responded. They had both lived lives filled with traumas, but this one, so fresh and raw in her mind, on her skin, felt worse to Jyn than all the rest.

“He said you remembered his...rescue...on the beach?” Cassian asked, voice almost swallowed in the dark.

Jyn blinked against the green light that glinted at the edge of her vision at just the mention of the beach. She turned slightly onto her side, careful not to jostle her ankle, and tucked her forehead against Cassian’s arm that lay next to her on the cot.

“Just barely,” she whispered. “Not at first - it was like, when he told me what happened, things sort of just...fell back into place.” She closed her eyes tightly and breathed out, “I wish they hadn’t.”

In the darkness she felt small and scared, like she was back on Lah’mu huddled in the cave, waiting for Saw to come find her. Beside her, Cassian’s arm shifted and he lifted it to wrap around her shoulder. Instinctively, she moved closer, into his side and against his chest. She heard him groan - barely an exhale - beneath her and with a jolt she realized she’d jostled his ribs, and began to pull away. But Cassian’s arms tightened at her back.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“I don’t want to hurt --”

“Please. Stay.”

Jyn tucked her face against Cassian’s neck and reached in the darkness for his other hand, which she held to her chest. Jyn had spent most of her life avoiding such close contact with others. Saw had taught her the dangers of letting someone that close, and by the time she’d realized his paranoia had skewed her perspective, she was on her own, where she couldn’t afford to  _ not _ be paranoid - it was either that or risk losing what little life she’d had. Saw would undoubtedly call her foolish and accuse her of being weak, but something about Cassian’s presence calmed her, made this swiftly turning galaxy crawling with Imps feel slightly more knowable.

Jyn trusted Cassian, she realized. The notion should have caught her off guard, should have made her stomach drop like a ship falling out of hyperspace, but it didn’t. She couldn’t say when that trust had taken root, but it sat firm and heavy on her chest, a warm comfort that seeped out of her like sunpetal honey.

After almost a full minute of silence, Cassian spoke again. “I don’t remember much,” he said. “I...can’t.”

“You don’t want to,” Jyn supplied, pulling herself back to the present. She knew that that, at least, was how she felt. She wanted to forget so much of what had happened to her since the rebels had found her. It was like a tidal wave ready to rise up and wash her away.

“I  _ really  _ don’t,” Cassian breathed. “But I do remember one thing. The only clear memory I’ve been able to let through.” He was silent for a long time. Jyn thought he might have drifted off to sleep. She wanted to - felt like she could with his warmth beside her. “It’s  _ you _ . It’s the green of your eyes.”

“You mean the green of the…” Jyn swallowed, couldn’t say it.

“No,” Cassian said. “It was just before. The sun was setting. I had never seen the bits of green in your eyes before.”

Jyn tightened her own hold on Cassian’s shoulder. He wrapped both arms tightly around her and seemed to breathe her in. Jyn knew that his ribs must be protesting something awful, but she couldn’t bring herself to let go, to lose the warm protection that enveloped her - so unlike the tidal wave of memories. Something about the solid weight of Cassian’s arms around her made Jyn feel safe for the first time in as long as she could remember.

* * *

The next morning they gathered what little supplies the ship had offered them and packed up the speeder. Cassian didn’t know where they were going, but they’d set out in the same direction that he had the day before, with plans to follow the water, in hopes of it leading them to civilization.

Heading out through the forest, Cassian didn’t feel the unease he’d felt the first time. He couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, though, and for a moment he considered telling Jyn about the voice he’d heard. But when he looked to her beside him, eyes closed against the wind and face content for the first time that he could remember, he decided against it. He had a feeling hearing the voices of their dead friends would wipe that look from her face, and Cassian wasn't ready for that to happen.

The speeder covered ground much quicker than Cassian had on foot, and soon they were leaving the forest and their wrecked ship behind them. They were greeted with the sight of the sun cresting over mountains in the distance.

“Inactive volcanoes,” Kay corrected from his seat behind the wheel when Cassian commented on them. “Based on my readouts, they have not been active in over a millennium.”

“Just our luck,” Jyn said drily. “Active volcanoes would have really made this trip a  _ real _ adventure.”

“What a shame, indeed,” Kay responded. “I’d have been more than willing to dump you out on one.”

From the back seat of the speeder, where she sat sideways with her leg outstretched, Jyn hid a grin behind Kay’s back and rolled her eyes at Cassian. As they sped across the grasslands toward the creek where Cassian had found the speeder, he let himself begin to relax. They had no idea where they were, where they were going, or how they would get home. But at that moment, listening to Kay and Jyn bickering, sharing a quiet camaraderie with Jyn, remembering the weight of her against him in the night, and feeling the beginning of  _ something more  _ stirring between them, Cassian wanted to hold onto that - a small sliver of what he could only assume might resemble a normal life.

Except for those first six years on Fest, which Cassian barely remembered, he had never lived a civilian life - he wasn’t sure he’d know how to. As a child, he hadn’t gone to school like most children in the galaxy - there just hadn’t been the resources. Instead, he had learned everything through application. If Cassian had a sack of a dozen rocks, and it took three rocks to take out a clonetrooper, how many more rocks did he need to take out that squadron without calling for backup? The older he got, the more sophisticated his weapons became and the more he learned. By the time General Draven had found and recruited him, Cassian already knew how to pilot a shuttle and had learned how to remain faceless in a crowd. He might not have had the credentials for an ordinary civilian career, but it was more than enough for the Alliance to add him to their growing numbers - one more warm body to fight for the cause.

He wondered now if Draven - if the rest of the Alliance high command - thought he was now just one more body  _ lost  _ to the cause. Rogue One had gone off on their own, had defied orders, had committed mutiny, sedition, and what could very likely count as treason. Whether the Alliance would act on those potential charges was another matter. But if they thought them all dead, then it was a moot point.

Cassian pulled himself from that train of thought as they neared the stream, and Kaytoo banked the ‘speeder, pushing them along a westward trajectory. As they traveled, cliffs like the one they’d nearly crashed into on their landing rose up around them, and Cassian realized they were at the basin of a canyon.

He felt his stomach churn for a moment at the thought of what the Alliance was doing now that the plans to the Death Star had been transmitted. Had they been intercepted? Had they even made it back to Yavin? Was the council still sitting around arguing about best plan of action, so convinced that war was not the answer? 

Mutiny or not, Cassian would do it all over again if it would still have gotten the plans into rebel hands. Here, so far from Scarif, and even further from Yavin, Cassian was disconnected from the Alliance for the first time since he’d joined up as a teenager. The thought set his teeth on edge, so he cast it aside and returned his attention to the landscape around them.

“I don’t like the look of this,” Jyn was saying to Kaytoo. “We need to get out of this canyon. We should go around.”

“I have no data on the regions north or south of this section. It would be unwise to --”

“We don’t have data on any of this,” Jyn countered. “This is an isolated planet in an isolated system. All I’m saying is those cliffs are great hiding spots for an attack from above.”

Cassian cast a look around the fast approaching cliffs. He wished he had his quadnocs or even a decent scope to assess the craggy rock faces that rose around them. The wind rushing past made it difficult to hear, but he caught a fleeting scent that suddenly put him on high alert -  _ spice _ .

“Jyn’s right, Kay,” he said, affecting a calm nonchalance he did not feel. “Take us north.”

Jyn looked sharply at Cassian, and she laid a hand against his arm. When he turned to look at her, her eyes were probing, as if she could tell there was something he was not saying. He met her gaze, but let his other senses take lead, as all the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

They’d barely changed direction when Cassian felt a frisson of electricity in the air and suddenly the back of the speeder was struck with blaster fire. Before he could think about what he was doing, Cassian had slid over the back of the speeder’s front seat to cover Jyn, pulling her down out of the line of fire. Below him he could hear her low growl and a harsh exhale against his skin as he realized he had landed on her bad leg. He quickly shifted off of her, ignoring his own protesting ribs, and scanned the horizon and the cliffs, looking for a sign of their attacker. The blaster had hit their bumper, doing minimal damage, but Cassian wouldn’t bet they were in the clear yet.

As Kaytoo pushed the speeder to its limits, Cassian again caught a scent on the air. This time, though, it wasn’t the spice - it was the animal. Before he could turn or say a word to Kay, the droid was banking the speeder sharply to avoid the sudden appearance from the shadows of the canyon of the massive Brintak and the men Cassian had narrowly avoided the day before.

With the sound of a sharp, high whistle, another group appeared from behind, moving swiftly with both blasters and pikes. Cassian knelt in the speeder’s back seat, blaster raised. Jyn was at his back in an instant, covering as much of the group as possible.

With nowhere to go, Kay continued to circle. Cassian could hear him rattling off probabilities of escape, but ignored him in favor of keeping an eye on the blasters that were quickly surrounding them.

“Stop,” came a gruff voice, and Kaytoo stilled the speeder. Both Cassian and Jyn turned toward the voice with blasters raised. Cassian saw that it belonged to the man he’d seen the day before - scowl in place beneath heavy brows - as he sat atop the Brintak. He stared down at them for a long moment while his men trained their weapons on them. “You don’t look like the type of folk who usually make their way to these parts.”

Cassian thought that their bedraggled appearances would actually have helped them blend in in their present company, but then he realized that the man was eying Kaytoo and the Imperial insignia splashed across his shoulders.

Before Cassian could speak, beside him Jyn lowered her blaster slightly and turned to face the man more fully. He sat so much higher than they did that she had to crane her neck. “And what type do we look like?” she asked, and her accent shifted. Her voweled loosened and softened. All traces of her Coruscanti accent vanished in place of an Outer Rim drawl.

The man’s eyes flashed and he sat forward on the beast. “The type who are in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said, a razor’s edge smirk cutting across his features. A heavy silence fell for the space of a few seconds that seemed to drawn out for minutes. “Restrain them,” the man finally said, and with a low sharp whistle, two burly men stepped forward.

Beside Cassian, Jyn was slowly reaching for a vibroblade in a pocket at her thigh. “We have a meeting at Glasspoint,” Cassian said before the men reached them, drawing their attention away from Jyn’s movement. “At the new moon.” It was the only intel he had to go off of, the only thing that he knew meant anything to these men. With any luck it would keep the men from firing first.

“Not anymore, you don’t,” said their leader with a leer. “That murder droid’s ours.”

Cassian’s shoulders tensed. In front of them, Kaytoo muttered, “This is why I need a blaster.” The droid had taken his hands off the speeder’s controls, and Cassian knew he was calculating the odds of fighting off these men. They were outnumbered and outgunned. After surviving the destruction of Scarif, they were about to die at the hands of pirates in an unknown backwater system where they’d never be found.

As two men neared them with both shackles and blasters raised in front of them, there was another shot of blaster fire from across the canyon. It reverberated off the high cliffs, disorienting the group, who turned, guns raised in all directions, searching for the source. The three men who surrounded them stayed stock still, ignoring the firefight going on around them.

Across the clearing came an old speeder bike - it reminded Cassian of one he’d learned to drive as a child. As it neared, he could see two riders - a petite woman with dark skin and a riot of curls that flew back behind her, and behind her another woman, tall and thin with a shock of short white hair. They slowed the bike at the edge of the rough clump of men. Cassian was surprised that, while they all aimed their weapons at the two interlopers, none fired.

The tall woman stepped down off the back of the bike and walked forward toward the center of the group, ignoring the eyes on her as if she were out for a morning stroll. She paused in front of the Brintak and looked up at the rider.

“How many times must we have this conversation, Turian?” she asked, sounding vaguely tired and irritated. “If you must pass through the canyon, you do so discreetly and without disturbance.”

The man, Turian, scowled and his grip went to the rifle at his side. On the ground, Cassian could see the woman reach into her robe and pull out a piece of metal that Cassian had never seen in person before -  _ a lightsaber _ . Behind him, Jyn’s breath ghosted against his neck, “Is that…?”

Turian removed his hand from the blaster and rolled his eyes. “We came across a couple Rimmers with a kriffing Imperial police droid, Madam. I’d call this  _ preemptively mitigating a disturbance _ .” His lip curled into a sneer as he said the words, mocking.

The other woman, who still sat on the bike scoffed. “Like you’re not just gonna take that thing for yourself,” she said, and her gaze lingered on Kaytoo, suspicious. Her hand sat casually on the blaster at her hip. At closer range, Cassian realized she was older than he thought - her hair was streaked through with grey and her face was weathered. “This is our territory.”

Jyn shifted behind Cassian. “We don’t want any trouble,” she said. Cassian looked back, wary of the fine line they tread, and he saw she was clutching her necklace in one hand. “We --”

“I’m sure that you don’t,” said the tall woman. Her eyes were sharp as she stared at Jyn, as if trying to see through her. Without looking away from Jyn, she said, “Turian, get your men out of our valley before I have to ask again.” She altered her grip on the lightsaber, but did not draw it. The men shifted and muttered around her nonetheless. “As Min said, this is our territory. We will escort these two back to their ship.”

Turian bared his teeth at them, but after a few long tense moments, he tugged on the Brintak’s reins and turned away with a series of expletives. With another set of sharp whistles, all of his men fell into step behind him, leaving Cassian, Jyn, and Kaytoo in the company of what Cassian could only assume were two hardened Jedi.

* * *

Jyn’s kyber crystal was radiating so much warmth that she was certain it would start glowing or burst into flames beneath her tunic. In the pandemonium of the arrival of the two women, she had palmed the vibroblade hidden in the ankle of her boot. She knew it would be pointless when face to face with a lightsaber, but Jyn would not go down without a fight. Beside her, Cassian gripped his blaster, finger moving to flick off the safety. As he turned his gaze to the Jedi and opened his mouth to speak, the tall woman held up a hand, eyes on Turian’s group as they made their way toward the northern edge of the canyon. Jyn could see Cassian suppress his irritation and his tension in one fluid roll of his shoulders that gave the appearance of a relaxed shrug.

After what could have been a minute or an hour, Jyn couldn’t say for sure, the taller of the two women turned her gaze away from the retreating band of pirates, tucked the lightsaber back in the pocket of her robe and stepped over to stand in front of Cassian and Jyn.

“My apologies for the posturing,” she said, looking first to Cassian, then to Jyn behind him, where her gaze lingered on Jyn’s necklace, before finally greeting Kaytoo with a short nod. “It’s the easiest way to keep the peace with Turian’s group.”

“Doesn’t sound like a sustainable plan,” Jyn said before she could stop herself.

“It worked, didn’t it?” groused the other woman - Min, her partner had called her. “Just be glad those bastards drew the conclusions they did. They hate anyone associated with the Empire, but they hate the Alliance even more.”

Beside Jyn, in one swift motion, Cassian lifted his blaster and pointed it directly between Min’s eyes.

“I’d like to see you try,” she said, barely flinching.

“Please, Captain,” said the other woman. “We did not mean to startle you.” Jyn’s hand fell from her crystal to the small of Cassian’s back. She should be on high alert, should have her own blaster trained on the women before them, but something gave Jyn pause. She could hear her mother’s voice in her ear, telling her to  _ trust the force _ . But Jyn was not stupid enough to equate trusting the force with trusting two strangers - even if they had saved their skin, even if they could possibly be Jedi.

From his place at the front of the speeder, Kaytoo spoke. “Their vital signs do not indicate deceit or an intent to fight.”

Cassian slowly lowered his blaster a few inches. “Who the hell are you?” he spat.

“My name is Reeva Trace,” said the tall woman, bowing her head slightly in greeting before turning to Min. “My partner is Min Windu. We live in the ranite cliffs of Giaca.” She gestured around the valley to the rise of cliffs around them.

“How do you know who we are?” Jyn asked, already knowing the answer.

From her place on the speeder bike, Min shrugged and grinned. “We’re Jedi.”

In front of her, Kaytoo huffed in a way that only he could. “What a predictable response.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait on this update - this summer has been nuts: big work projects, summer grad classes, wedding season, and a new cat!
> 
> Many thanks to the wonderful [ibohemianam](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ibohemianam/pseuds/ibohemianam) for encouraging me to keep playing in this world - and for catching my embarrassingly inconsistent verb tense issues! Any mistakes remaining are all on me.
> 
> Also thanks to all you readers - I'm behind on some comment replies, but you keep me motivated.

Jyn didn’t trust easily, especially when it came to strong people with weapons claiming they wanted to help her. Her rescue from Wobani felt like another lifetime ago, but she still knew the sharp tang of adrenaline she’d felt hefting a shovel, knocking Melshi over the head with it, and fleeing - or rather, attempting to flee - directly into Kaytoo’s chokehold. That instinct to run was still there, but it was less persistent now - sedated and docile beneath the warm glow of her kyber crystal and her mother’s voice in her head telling her,  _ Trust the force.  _ It ran through her head, strong and steady, in time with her heartbeat.

She, Cassian, and Kaytoo had followed the Jedi at a distance in their speeder, wary of what they could be stepping into - but when their only known options for aid were a band of pirates who’d just as soon kill them as sell them into slavery, or a pair of old Jedi, Jyn felt safer with the women. They at least had common enemies, though Jyn had known all her life that that would hardly make them fast friends.

As the speeder bike in front of them slowed at the foot of a cliff face nestled at the edge of the forest, Jyn saw a structure in the rock, almost hidden from view - a metal door stuck into the side of the craggy rock, half-covered in moss and lichen. A knot formed, heavy in her gut as she realized it reminded her of Saw’s secluded base on Wrea.

In front of them, Reeva Trace swung one leg over the side of the bike, disembarking with a fluid grace that Jyn had never seen in a human before. She stepped over to the door, poked at a small, ancient keypad, and it retracted with a low groan and hiss of pistons. In the front seat of their speeder, Cassian reached for his blaster. Behind him, Jyn fingered the release of her folded vibroblade.

Reeva turned toward them, then, her pale head tilting in consternation. “I know trust does not come easy to you, Captain - to any of you,” she said, gesturing to Jyn, and to Kaytoo as well, Jyn noticed with faint surprise.  “But trust me when I say that if we planned to kill you, you’d already be dead.”

“What happened to not posturing?” Jyn snapped, fingers clenching on her knife as she pulled herself to a standing position in the speeder’s seat, leaning her weight against the side panel.

“It’s not posturing if it’s true, is it?” said Min Windu, who ignored Jyn’s movements and instead powered down the bike and casually began guiding it through the open door.

“We are not a threat,” Reeva said. She clasped her hands in front of her and leaned forward slightly, as if prepared to bow. Jyn couldn’t see any sign of her lightsaber, but she knew it was somewhere within the folds of the Jedi’s long cloak. “You clearly need aid and we are willing to provide it.”

Jyn knew a stalemate when she saw one, and she also knew that the woman was right. They did need help - medical aid, transport, plus food and water, she realized, as she recognized the growing ache in her gut after 72 hours of nothing but the odd bite or two of a ration bar and sips of tepid, stale water. She reached down into the speeder for her crutches and moved to climb out.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jyn saw Cassian move and she expected him to fight her, to tell her to stop, but when he didn’t say anything she looked over and met his eyes. They were wary and clouded - something uncertain moving behind them. It reminded her of their days on Jedha, reaching out for allies in a tumultuous war zone where the enemy of your enemy was just as likely to shoot you in the back as save your skin. This wasn’t Jedha, she thought. This wasn’t a war zone, but what it was, they had yet to understand. Cassian hopped out of the speeder and held out his hand to her.

She wanted to refuse, to say that she could do it herself, but she knew that this was more than a simple hand. She nodded to him and held his gaze, grasping his hand tightly and hoping he could see the understanding in her gesture, feel the trust in her grip.  _ We are in this together _ , she thought.  _ We have to be _ . As her foot settled on the grass, Cassian blinked down at her. His eyes had cleared, his face had smoothed, and suddenly he was Cassian the  _ spy _ again, all trace of turmoil buried.

He stepped forward, moving a couple of meters away from the speeder, and Jyn followed. Kaytoo exited the speeder silently and walked at Jyn’s six, leaving her oddly comforted for his protection. Though Jyn was willing to put a modicum of trust in these people, it went against every instinct she had to enter the dark cave. Before her, Cassian stilled.  Every line of his body was tense, coiled and ready to spring if necessary. Reeva stood, equally still, but posture radiating calm - a peace offering.

“After you,” he said to Reeva, and his voice cut like a knife in the heavy silence between them. Reeva turned without a word to a panel inside the door and flipped a switch. The dark space lit up and Jyn could see they were in a makeshift hangar of sorts - a space for the speeder bike in the center and along the wall hung assorted tools and junk parts. The makings of an amateur trading post, Jyn thought. As she moved closer, never straying far from Cassian’s shoulder, they stood warily in the entrance. She could see a strange metal staircase in the center of the room - it coiled around a support strut like a screw and disappeared through a hole in the rock ceiling.

Before Jyn could protest, Reeva and Min climbed the spiral staircase and disappeared into the room above. Behind her, Kaytoo shifted and met Cassian’s eyes over Jyn’s head. As the droid took a hesitant step onto the metal stairs, he lifted his gaze and took in the structure and the space above.

“Do you have a bad feeling about this?” Jyn murmured.

Kaytoo turned back to Jyn, the soft sound of his servos whirring filling the silence around them. “I do not have enough data to support that claim,” was all he said. Jyn thought that sounded like an evasive way of saying  _ yes _ , but said nothing else. She hoped she was wrong to worry because she was still utterly useless to them if they had to fight their way out of there.

Kaytoo ascended first through whatever silent agreement he and Cassian had made in their shared gaze, and she followed along behind him at a distance, Cassian close on her heels. He watched as Kay reached the top without a struggle before turning to Jyn, placing a hand on her elbow, a question in his gaze.

“I can manage,” she said softly, and as he pulled away, she reached out and clasped his hand.

* * *

Cassian’s years of experience told him that climbing those stairs would be a rookie mistake - regardless of what Kay’s data said. The hole in the ceiling was large enough for a human to fit through, but not by much. He didn’t like having Jyn in front of him - he’d have preferred to case their surroundings before leaving her exposed to whatever their supposed allies might have lying in wait for them. But he also liked being at her back for once, liked that she trusted him enough to hold her crutches while she hopped awkwardly up the stairs, using the railings as her support.

Above them Kay remained quiet; there was no sign of a struggle. Usually that would have put Cassian at ease, but these were Jedi they were dealing with. He’d long given up trying to understand their skills and had spent the majority of his childhood feeling hostile to them. When the Empire had risen, his anger had turned to indifference and his attention had shifted. There’d been no point spending his energy on the dead.

In front of him, Jyn stilled, hands gripped tight to the railings. Cassian tightened his own grip on his blaster.

“What is it?” he breathed as quietly as he could, little more than a whisper against her ear.

She turned her head and Cassian realized that they were at eye-level, practically nose to nose. In the darkness Jyn’s eyes were dark, pupils wide. She tilted her head, listening. In the background, Cassian could hear shuffling and clanking of wood on metal. In front of him, Jyn turned and took a long slow breath through her nose.

“Are they... _ cooking _ ?” she whispered.

* * *

Jyn reached the top of the stairs, and as soon as she steadied herself, she slid the vibroblade down her sleeve to land in her palm. The tableau in front of her was so far from what she’d grown used to that it took her a moment to take it in, to recognize what she was seeing. Reeva stood at a basin sink, where water ran in a steady stream over something green and leafy. To her right, Min held a large wooden spoon in one hand and a pan in the other. A pot sat at the back of a stovetop, where water was beginning to simmer.

“They haven’t eaten in days,” Min was saying to Reeva, mouth pulled into a grimace. “Why would they want a salad? I ate this morning and I don’t even want it.”

“Fresh greens are high in minerals and vitamins--”

“So’s meat!”

“Just because you have the palate of a rancor--”

“ _ You _ have the palate of a nerf!” Min snapped, pointing the spoon in Reeva’s direction, lips pursed in annoyance. When she caught sight of Jyn standing at the top of the stairs, she turned and lowered her spoon. Jyn blinked and willed her grip on the knife to ease. Min eyed her for another moment before turning away to place her pan on the stovetop.

“Please, make yourselves at home,” Reeva said, and gestured behind her, where Jyn saw a wooden slab table surrounded by an assortment of mismatched stools and chairs. Beyond the kitchen Jyn could see a low sofa and worn, squishy armchair next to an ancient dejarik table. Kaytoo stood by the far wall, observing a shelf of holobooks.

Jyn didn’t move until she felt the heat of Cassian at her back. He was silent for a long moment and she knew that he was also surveying their surroundings.

“You built this place yourself?” he asked. As Jyn continued to look around she noticed the rough-hewn windows, fitted with transpariplast. Beneath layers of carpets, she could see the stone floor peeking through.

“We’re not without allies,” Reeva said. “We’ve had some help over the years, but yes, we built Ashla’an Point almost twenty years ago.”

Twenty years, Jyn thought. That would have been the tail end of the war. Lyra had taught her about the purge and the clone protocol as part of her homeschooling as a child on Lah’mu. Her mother had always looked so sad when she’d spoken of the Jedi, and she’d spend much of the day after their lessons meditating with her kyber crystal in hand.

“You fled Coruscant?” she asked.

“It was that or die,” said Min. Her eyes were hard and unreadable. It struck Jyn that they must have left everyone they’d known behind - either dead or dying. Jyn lowered her gaze and swallowed the hard lump that suddenly rose in her throat. She sat down at the table and willed away the roar of tidal waves pounding in her ears.

Jyn sat while Cassian continued asking questions, suddenly feeling more exhausted than she had in a very long time. Something about sitting in someone’s kitchen, watching them cook and interact where war wasn’t looming over their heads, made her feel small, but also safe. She looked out the window, where the midday sun streamed in through the trees below, catching on silvery green leaves. They were tall and pale, like those among which they’d crash-landed. Jyn realized she had lost her bearings - she had no mental map of where they were - and wondered if they were on the edge of the same forest.

“You should elevate it.”

Jyn blinked, and realized she’d been staring, lost in her thoughts. Reeva stood across the table, a cup of something steaming in one hand. “Your ankle,” she said, gesturing with a willowy hand to Jyn’s leg. “So it won’t swell.”

Jyn nodded, pulling a bench closer to her to set her leg up. The dull throb she’d all but been ignoring for the last couple hours slowly began to seep away.

Reeva sat the cup down in front of Jyn, and she realized it was caf. She eyed it ravenously. Jyn couldn’t remember the last time she’d had caf - and this smelled like  _ good  _ caf.

As Jyn reveled in the scent and taste of strong, fresh caf, Cassian sat down next to her on the bench, careful to avoid her ankle. She noticed that he still laid a hand nearby, as if he wanted to touch her leg.

“Where do you get your supplies?” Cassian asked Reeva, back straight, ever the intelligence officer. Before she could speak, Min pulled a pan from the stove and carried it across the small space between the oven and the table.

“As much as I love this little interrogation, Captain,” she groused. “I’m hungry and I’m sure you’re hungrier. For the love of the Force, take a breather.”

She sat the pan down with more force than was necessary, Jyn thought, but she couldn’t help the small smirk that tugged at her lips. Cassian eyed Min with a stubborn glint in his eye that Jyn recognized from the first time she’d met him, when he’d loomed over her in the sitroom on Yavin IV. That look that said he’d rather starve than stop asking questions, not until he’d gotten the answers he needed.

Min returned his stare with her own, an eyebrow cocked and an equally steely look in her eye that said she could do this all night. Reeva sighed and sat down a stack of plates and utensils and a basket of bread before sitting down across from Jyn.

Jyn looked at the pan in the center of the table. Reeva and Min must have compromised, as there were large chunks of meat as well as braised greens enveloped in a rich brown sauce, spiced with scents Jyn couldn’t identify, but which made her mouth water nonetheless.

Next to her, Cassian hadn’t even blinked. Instead, he watched Min expectantly. Jyn respected his caution and his determination, but she was kriffing hungry and her gut and the warmth of the kyber crystal at her chest told her they were not under threat. Jyn reached for the serving spoon at the center of the table, ready to serve herself if Cassian was going to take all night. Reeva followed suit and served two more plates before serving herself.

But when Jyn lifted a fork to her mouth, Cassian’s hand whipped out and stilled her wrist, gentle but firm. He met her eyes briefly before turning to Reeva. Silence hung still in the room until both Reeva and Min had taken several bites. When Cassian remained silent, Min opened her mouth and flapped her tongue around in a way that reminded Jyn of a Gungan.

“Happy?” Min growled, before prodding at her food again.

“Was that really necessary, dear?” Reeva asked, voice as calm as ever, with just a hint of sarcasm. Jyn vaguely wondered if the woman had ever raised her voice.

“Was  _ that _ really necessary?” she asked back, gesturing at Cassian. Jyn looked to him once more, and he gave a minute nod and released her wrist. She immediately tore into her food, relishing the warm spices and honest-to-Force meat and vegetables, not the wretched, grainy protein cubes she’d been eating since Wobani. Another silence fell, but this time it was less oppressive and something that could almost be peaceful.

* * *

Cassian was hungry. It had been several days since he’d had more than a few spare bites of crumbly Imperial protein bars, and even longer since he’d eaten in the mess at Base One. He’d gone longer without real food, certainly, and growing up with military fare made food, like sleep, merely something he needed to keep fighting. It did smell good - buttery and spicy, scents he vaguely recognized from some of his undercover work in the Core. But he’d have been throwing away all of his training if he’d taken the first bite with no knowledge of what might have been in it. 

He watched the others eat in quiet observation for a few moments. Jyn, who was always as cautious as he was, if not more so, had not so much as paused before devouring what was on her plate, and she made no signs of slowing. He wanted to trust these people. They needed allies if they were going to get off this planet. 

When he finally lifted his fork and took a tentative bite, he immediately understood Jyn’s behavior. It tasted even better than it smelled - far better than most of the greasy street food he often ate on assignment throughout the Core and Mid Rim. Cassian let himself eat - like a starving animal who didn’t know when his next meal would be, or where it would come from. He needed the energy, if only to gain more intelligence.

When his plate was half empty, he returned to his mental list of questions, this time to one he’d let go earlier.

“How did you  _ really _ know who we were?” he asked.

“Despite your friend here, you’re obviously not Imperial,” Min said with a glance at Kaytoo, who stood sentinel several meters away. His eyes were dark, but Cassian knew he was alert for anything suspect. “You don’t have the look of smugglers, but you’re clearly not civilians.”

“How do you know we’re not Imperial?” Jyn asked. “Half of our clothes are Imperial, as are our weapons.”

“The Empire can’t get here,” said Min, dismissively, sitting back in her chair.

Before Cassian could speak to such an absurd notion, Jyn cut in again. “Please, I’ve heard that line before,” she scoffed, voice bitter. “But it’s just not kriffing true. Everyone  _ always _ thinks they’re safe, thinks they’re too small or insignificant - ants hiding from a boot.”

“That metaphor is suspect,” said Kaytoo. Jyn raised an eyebrow at him but said nothing.

“You can hardly be considered ants, though, right?” Cassian said, eyes turning to Reeva, who had been silent for several minutes. “You’ve been hiding from the Empire for twenty years now.” 

Across the table, Min sat forward again, teeth bared. “What the fuck do you know about it?” she growled. “We were plotting against Palpatine before you could lift a blaster.” 

Reeva moved a hand to sit beside Min’s, not touching but simply close by. It seemed to calm Min, who sighed, slouched back in her seat again and crossed her arms, letting her dark hair fall into her eyes, which fixed on a distant point on the far wall.

“You’re right,” Reeva said softly. “The Empire could reach us here if they wanted. But as I’m sure you noticed, finding the planet is one thing. Landing here, surviving, is another.”

“Besides,” Min said, brushing her hair back out of her face, eyes still far away. “Their priorities are elsewhere.”

“You seem to have enough other problems on your hands,” Jyn said. “Even without the Empire breathing down your neck.”

“That’s where I’m not convinced,” Cassian said, looking between Min and Reeva. “You say the Empire’s not here, but if the Black Sun is here, then the Empire surely knows about this place.”

Min scoffed and rolled her eyes, attention snapping back to their guests. “That was  _ not _ the kriffing Black Sun.”

“That man - their leader --”

“Turian, yes,” said Reeva. 

“He wore the symbol of the Black Sun on his jacket,” Cassian pushed on. “I saw it.”

“Look, that sack of bantha shit only wishes he were Black Sun,” Min said, raising her cup of caf to her lips, a grim smirk on her face. “Ever heard of the Binayre Pirates?”

“No,” Cassian said.

“ _ Seriously? _ ” Jyn said, eyes incredulous as she looked at Min. “Since when have they moved out of the Core?” At Cassian’s silence, she added. “They’re a sort of off-shoot of Black Sun, but even greedier and more bloodthirsty, if you can imagine.” 

Cassian could easily picture Jyn - or was it Lianna - getting into scrapes with space pirates. She’d clearly held her own if she was here to talk about it, but the thought sent his stomach churning. 

“They use Giaca as a sort of test,” Reeva was saying. “For new recruits and business partners. If you can make the dangerous hyperspace journey and get past their obstacles on the ground, then they consider doing business with you.”

“Brilliant,” Jyn muttered irritably, taking a bite of her bread.

“What sort of business?” Cassian asked. His thoughts were already racing ahead, wondering at what sorts of transport they’d have.

“Spice, munitions, forgeries, bounties,” Min listed off. “You name it, they’ll do it. Like she said, pretty much no limits.”

“And you let them get away with it?” Cassian remembered the way they’d held their ground earlier. They hadn’t used their lightsabers, but something about the way Turian had eyed them made him suspect they weren’t just bluffing.

Min raised an eyebrow. “We’re not sheriffs. That’s not why we’re here. We do what we have to do to get by. Surely a Captain of the Alliance would understand the need to protect his own, no matter the price.”

Cassian gritted his teeth but gave nothing away. Just because he was tired of playing that game didn’t mean he wasn’t just as guilty of it as anyone else. But hearing the words from a Jedi was more than a little disconcerting.

“What other factions inhabit this planet?” Kaytoo asked, breaking the tense silence as everyone swiveled to look at him. He had moved from his earlier spot by the window to examine an old transceiver gathering dust in a corner. “My readouts noted various signs of life and high energy usage to the north and south.”

“Don’t worry,” Reeva said. “They’re friendlies.”

“To  _ us _ \--”

“It’s been over a year since the Shorak attacked Tallpeak.”

“Pretty sure that just means they’re overdue,” Min muttered.

“These friendlies have transport?” Jyn asked. “Sounds like an easier plan than stealing from Binayre.”

“The Shorak do,” Min said. “Their station is a few hours north of here. You can get that leg looked at. Your ribs, too,” she added, gesturing to Cassian.

Cassian sat up straighter. He wanted to ask again how they knew so much about them, but he knew now that he’d have to chalk it up to Jedi and their so-called Force. He was a skeptic through and through - he had been for as long as he’d known the term Jedi, since he’d learned of the Force as a child - but lately, he was less sure. The memory of Chirrut’s voice in his ear was still fresh, yet he was left with no explanation for what he’d heard. Cassian could practically see Chirrut’s cryptic smile as he realized the best source of information sat in front of him.

With every question answered, there arose yet another to take its place. In others, he thought, the endeavor might sound overwhelming, but Cassian was used to that game, to filling in gaps in slow meticulous sweeps. 

Next to him, Jyn grasped her kyber crystal in her hand. Cassian realized that she looked relaxed, an expression he’d rarely seen. He laid a hand on her leg, running his thumb across the rough fabric of the knee of her trousers. She turned and saw him looking at her, and she smiled. 

He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to trust these Jedi, but he would take their help - for now. If it made Jyn smile, he’d do whatever he could to keep that look on her face. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jyn’s reference to Saw's base on Wrea and her line about ants are "canonical" references to _Rebel Rising_.

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on [tumblr](http://gemini-melia.tumblr.com)!


End file.
